can anyone explain to me the ward's method? With particular focus on what variance within-clusters means and also how we can compute the cluster's variance. Thank you submitted by /u/Purple-Surround2640 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

Hello everyone! Over the past few weeks, I have been gathering a list of AI tools and organizing them. Some of these tools may not have a lot of information, so I hope that this list will make it easier for you to research and choose the best one for you. I will continue to add more details and regularly update the list. You are welcome to contribute to the list as well. You can contribute without registering an account and I will review and approve the submissions. Here is the list : https://favird.com/l/ai-tools-and-applications Please let me know if you have any questions and feedbacks. Thanks! submitted by /u/GrabWorking3045 [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

Just downloaded the Simbrain software. Looking for resources to help me understand how to use them, what they're capable of, and how to build my own. I'm mainly looking to understand prediction error, and reward processing. Will they help me understand these understand these concepts, on a deeper level? Sorry If this sounds silly, just discovered this software, today. submitted by /u/daddydilly694-20 [link] [comments]  ( 48 min )

submitted by /u/oridnary_artist [link] [comments]  ( 48 min )

Hey. I have watched a couple of youtube videos (3blue1brown, coding train, a few more) and learned online a bit about neural networks and I think I understand multilayer perceptrons and the algorithms behind them well. They receive input and return a probability of each answer. So when a neural network predicts a digit, it will return what it thinks is the probability for each of the digits (0-9). But, say I want to know what the price for a description of a house will be, do I just undo the activiation function at the end so I can have a big value (1-1million) and create a single output neuron? How will it work? submitted by /u/mrbeanshooter123 [link] [comments]  ( 54 min )

Hi! I am trying to build a very simple AI (very inspired by the 3blue1brown videos). I am having issues with gradient descent. I think I understand the basic idea (v→v′=v−η∇C) (η being the learning rate, v being my weights+biases and C being my cost function). However I can't seem to find out how to find the gradient of my cost function, since numpy.gradient() asks for an array as an input (I thought the input had to be a function). I suspect I am thinking of something incorrectly or doing something very wrong. If anyone could help me out I would appreciate it. Thank you! submitted by /u/HCook86 [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

submitted by /u/Personal-Trainer-541 [link] [comments]  ( 109 min )

submitted by /u/oridnary_artist [link] [comments]  ( 49 min )

Hello guys I just created a neural network (Reference from Neural Network from Scratch), I have completed upto optimization portion. Since I was feeling bit confident I decided to test my neural net with MINST handwritten data set, Everything is working , Loss is decreasing with each epoch but it's taking a lot of time, I am using VS code to run it, I checked task manager and it was using my cpu, I have rtx 3060 and i was wondering if I could use my GPU to make it faster, I tried watching yt but all of them used libs to make neural net while I created it using only numpy so I don't know if installing tensorflow will work, Please help me! I am new I am looking for a way to use my gpu to train my neural net in vs code(neural net made with numpy lib only) submitted by /u/Purple_Gen3 [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

submitted by /u/oridnary_artist [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/oridnary_artist [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/tebjan [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/Imagine-your-success [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

Is there anyway to implement AI, like ChatGPT, Text-Babbage-001, etc. on Google Spreadseets? If so, could you please DM me, I got an idea but I'm not an expert, so I'd appreciate some help. Thank you ^^. submitted by /u/Slow-Daikon-3222 [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

What is the best AI textbook you have read? submitted by /u/_zer0_0ne [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

I want to generate a smooth image-morphing video of Anime characters' faces with around 40 Custom Images. Something similar to this (images used in this is not custom images) Can anyone guide me through the steps of how to achieve these results with StyleGan2? Or is there any better alternative? I'm totally new to this please help! submitted by /u/Firestormsoumo [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

Basically i'm working on a game and i was trying to use character ai to improve my character designs (i used to improve the design but the ideas were basically mine) ​ Can i use it? submitted by /u/Confident_Joke_4121 [link] [comments]  ( 54 min )

submitted by /u/liquidocelotYT [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

Anyone want to try out my api to detect ai generated content? busterai.com submitted by /u/Ordinary-Grocery2980 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

($10 to the legend that helps the most.) Like the title says, I want to create an app like Lensa, where users can upload pictures of themselves and get a AI generated avatar back (with 10-100 versions of the avatar). submitted by /u/dondomigo [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

submitted by /u/manishsalunke [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

It's like the brain of the ai. I've been googling for the word but nothing is coming up. Edit: if it helps I remember that there were a lot more than 3 dimensions where it makes the connections. submitted by /u/chrisisbest197 [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

submitted by /u/moviesdusk [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

Hi guys, I have made a video on YouTube here where I cover why the Adam optimizer may fail to converge on some simple optimization problems and how AMSgrad aims to solve this issue . I hope it may be of use to some of you out there. As always, feedback is more than welcomed! :) submitted by /u/Personal-Trainer-541 [link] [comments]  ( 108 min )

is there a website that increases image length. e.g i upload an image and its square and i want it to be portrait and it auto fills in the edges using ai submitted by /u/Objective_Wealth_918 [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

I have a pretty big project that uses AI, I’m not an expert and I’m searching for somebody that understands AI perfectly. Hmu or comment if you are interested submitted by /u/Such_Aardvark_1044 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

submitted by /u/holamyeung [link] [comments]  ( 78 min )

submitted by /u/RichKatz [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

I built a chrome extension that summarises any article into a single paragraph using OpenAI's GPT. It also works with Amazon reviews (positive and negative mix) and popular Twitter threads. Just search "Squish AI" on the chrome web store :) Save time and stay informed with Squish submitted by /u/naveedjan_ [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

I'm looking for a way to automate data extraction from bar charts with error bars from peer-reviewed academic papers/PDFs. The goal here is to extract data values from charts and put them in a tabular form. Does anyone have any good resources for how to streamline automated chart mining in python or R? Or does anyone know of a good application/website that does chart mining? submitted by /u/HipPaprika [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

Recently, ChatGPT has become one of the hottest tools in the NLP area. I have tried it and it gives me amazing and fancy results. I believe it will benefit most of the people and make a significant advance in our life. However, unfortunately, I, as an NLP researcher in text generation, feel all what I have done seems meaningless now. I also don't know what I can do as ChatGPT is already strong enough and can solve most of my previous concerns in text generation. Research on ChatGPT also seems not possible as I believe it will not be an open-source project. Research on other NLP tasks also seems challenge as using a prompt in ChatGPT can solve most of the NLP tasks. Any suggestions or comments are welcome. submitted by /u/singularpanda [link] [comments]  ( 68 min )

What is the most simple and efficient way that you can feed a large dataset of quotes into a custom model that can then be used create new quotes based on that model's "style" using GPT-3? Thanks so much for your expertise and help! submitted by /u/Artemis_Nox [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

Hi ! Wrote an article about AI/ML in the Anti-Money laundering industry ! https://medium.com/@melmasset/ai-and-data-in-finance-the-role-of-machine-learning-in-anti-money-laundering-1d4dd6f5bacd submitted by /u/TechMelchior [link] [comments]  ( 66 min )

Greg Yang is a mathematician and AI researcher at Microsoft Research who for the past several years has done incredibly original theoretical work in the understanding of large artificial neural networks. His work currently spans the following five papers: Tensor Programs I: Wide Feedforward or Recurrent Neural Networks of Any Architecture are Gaussian Processes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12478 Tensor Programs II: Neural Tangent Kernel for Any Architecture: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14548 Tensor Programs III: Neural Matrix Laws: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10685 Tensor Programs IV: Feature Learning in Infinite-Width Neural Networks: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/yang21c.html Tensor Programs V: Tuning Large Neural Networks via Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer: https://arxiv.org/a…  ( 62 min )

I'm a technical product manager in my day job, and I've spent the past few months educating myself on recent advances in AI implementation in the pre-trained transformer and diffusion areas. I have some basic coding experience and have worked on several complex software projects in my role as a product manager, but my true expertise is in building high-level architectures based on user story frameworks (i.e. - define the key features of the product based on insights/research and build an HLA and technical/business dependency maps that serve as the foundation of a development backlog). I tend to sit right in the middle of the engineering, research, and UX design teams and help keep everyone focused on the things that matter. So in my personal time, I've now developed a considerable backlog…  ( 60 min )

Hi all, was given a dataset with 4 classes: types of beans. Is it possible to apply SVM to this set of data? submitted by /u/Usual_Association269 [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Increasingly deep learning is becoming the default face of modern AI. So my question is are there any other machine learning theories or ideas different from deep learning which have potential to be big in the future ? submitted by /u/sidney_lumet [link] [comments]  ( 67 min )

submitted by /u/pasticciociccio [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

1) A SOTA Language Model is Trained on 10x More Data Than Chinchilla -> Language models like Lambda and GPT3 are significantly undertrained. DeepMind proposed Chinchilla, a model which has similar performance to GPT3 with less than half the size (70B vs. 175B). Hence in 2023, significant performance gains will likely come from cleaner/larger datasets. 2) Generative Audio Tools Emerge and Will Attract 100K Developers -> Audio generation has approached human levels. If enough data of your voice is available, the generated speech can even sound amazingly authentic (this is also true for Drake lyrics). Leaving the uncanny valley of awkward robot voices will make adoption surge. 3) NVIDIA Announces Strategic Partnership With AGI-Focused Company Organisation -> Usage statistics in AI resea…  ( 73 min )

submitted by /u/matter-of-interest [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

Hi everyone, I have to cluster a large chunk of textual conversational business data to find relevant topics in it. Since there is lot of abstract info in every text like phone, url, numbers, email, name, etc., I have done some basic NER using regex and spacy NER to tag such info and make the texts more generic and canonicalized. But there are some things like product names, raw materials, brand/model, company, etc. which couldn't be tagged. Also, the accuracy of regex and spacy NER isn't high enough. Can anyone suggest a good python NER library, which is accurate and fast enough, preferably has pre-trained models and can tag diverse fields. Thanks. submitted by /u/Devinco001 [link] [comments]  ( 65 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16495 Abstract: We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score. For n answer choices, this is equivalent to an n-class classification setup where only one class (true answer) is correct. We instead show that classifying (question, true answer) as positive instances and (question, false answer) as negative instances is significantly more effective across various models and datasets. We show the efficacy of our proposed approach in different tasks -- abductive reasoning, commonsense question answering, science question answering, and sentence completion. Our DeBERTa binary classification model reaches the top or close to the top performance on public leaderboards for these tasks. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/team ​ https://preview.redd.it/r77sh3xczkaa1.png?width=2216&format=png&auto=webp&s=5591ca9b1d8a769ae088429abc2d945589bb5b67 submitted by /u/bideex [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Hi everyone, I have a large chunk of textual conversational data which is to be clustered in an unsupervised manner to find the popular topics in it. The data I have, has a lot of spelling errors. I have used many libraries like symspellpy, pyenchant, pyspellchecker, etc. to correct spelling errors but none of them seems to be accurate or fast enough. Also, they don't take into account context, abbreviations and grammer while spell correction. Can anyone suggest a python library which: Can correct spell errors without many false positives Has high accuracy and faster runtime Can take into account context, grammer, abbreviations, phonetics and adjacent keystroke errors while correcting spellings More preferable if multilingual too Thanks. submitted by /u/Devinco001 [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

submitted by /u/Friday33 [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Hi All, Did anyone receive invite for online test or interviews for the Apple AI Residency program for the 2023 batch? The deadline for applications was 7th December 2022. Haven't received any communication since then. submitted by /u/Extension-Reward5756 [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Let's say there's a whole paragraph of text, 90% of which is irrelevant fluff for my needs. What I'm specifically looking to do is isolate one key pertinent piece of information, which meets a certain criteria that I can somehow specify. As an example, let's say I have 1,000 paragraphs that are brief biographies of famous people from history. Is there any kind of AI tool I can use to say something like: "For each of these biographies, IF they include information about where this famous person was born? Isolate this piece of information and only output that as a result." Then it just runs through every single paragraph, conducts the analysis, finds the paragraphs that DO contain this information -- then outputs ONLY that as the result, for each paragraph? For example, full paragraph 1: …  ( 63 min )

I don't do very much work with neural models at all, so I'm not very familiar with the library ecosystem developed around them (think TF, Torch, theano, etc) but I'm working on a few projects that would benefit significantly from autograd and the ability to build out models at a higher level of abstraction analogous to layers/capsules/attention heads in neural models. Being able to define functions with explicit gradients would also allow me to use building blocks that autograd can't handle without more information (best example I can give is a nonlinear transformation that results from a constrained optimization problem, and gradients need to account for Lagrange multipliers being implicit functions of the input). And if there's performance gains to be had from a JIT, I certainly wouldn't complain! I'm not certain if I'm going to be able to get what I want out of the options I'm aware of for a few reasons- I don't know the libraries at all! Very frequently there are operations that don't lend themselves to trivial parallelism, require iteration or special function computation (like the polygamma and Bessel functions) which are much better suited to a CPU than a GPU I'll be exclusively working on CPU. Some of this is with sparse data that cannot be stored dense, so I'm unsure how that will translate. So, main question- if anyone uses these kinds of libraries for similar applications, is it helpful for development, code quality, performance, etc? Which do you use, and why? If you have experience doing formal academic research and/or developing+maintaining production projects I have particular interest in your thoughts. I'm hopeful that I can find a tool that will handle the math + numeric concerns as well as result in code that's easier to maintain. Thanks for your time! submitted by /u/comradeswitch [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

When I shared an image from the previous post on Twitter, someone who goes by the handle Nonetheless made the astute observation that image looked like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. That made me wonder what 1/Γ(x) would be like turned into a probability distribution, and whether it would be approximately like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. (Here I’m […] Maxwell-Boltzmann and Gamma first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

A little while ago I wrote a post looking at how the infinite product for sine converges. The plot of the error terms is both mathematically and aesthetically interesting. This post will look at similar plots for the reciprocal of the gamma function. The reciprocal of the gamma function is an entire function, i.e. is […] Visualizing convergence of an infinite product first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 4 min )

​ critic / policy / entropy loss step length in each episode reward in the last episode Hi, I learned the reinforcement learning by myself and tried to implement the SAC algorithm in a custom gym environment. but my agent's reward diverges despite a small learning rate like 1e-7, Can I get any advice on my simulation? ​ Thank you submitted by /u/sonlightinn [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Constraint programming is known for being an efficient approach for solving combinatorial problems. Important design choices in a solver are the branching heuristics, which are designed to lead the search to the best solutions in a minimum amount of time. However, developing these heuristics is a time-consuming process that requires problem-specific expertise. This observation has motivated many efforts to use machine learning to automatically learn efficient heuristics without expert intervention. To the best of our knowledge, it is still an open research question. Although several generic variable-selection heuristics are available in the literature, the options for a generic value-selection heuristic are more scarce. In this paper, we propose to tackle this issue by introducing a generic learning procedure that can be used to obtain a value-selection heuristic inside a constraint programming solver. This has been achieved thanks to the combination of a deep Q-learning algorithm, a tailored reward signal, and a heterogeneous graph neural network architecture. Experiments on graph coloring, maximum independent set, and maximum cut problems show that our framework is able to find better solutions close to optimality without requiring a large amounts of backtracks while being generic.  ( 2 min )

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based combinatorial optimization (CO) methods (i.e., DRL-NCO) have shown significant merit over the conventional CO solvers as DRL-NCO is capable of learning CO solvers less relying on problem-specific expert domain knowledge (heuristic method) and supervised labeled data (supervised learning method). This paper presents a novel training scheme, Sym-NCO, which is a regularizer-based training scheme that leverages universal symmetricities in various CO problems and solutions. Leveraging symmetricities such as rotational and reflectional invariance can greatly improve the generalization capability of DRL-NCO because it allows the learned solver to exploit the commonly shared symmetricities in the same CO problem class. Our experimental results verify that our Sym-NCO greatly improves the performance of DRL-NCO methods in four CO tasks, including the traveling salesman problem (TSP), capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), prize collecting TSP (PCTSP), and orienteering problem (OP), without utilizing problem-specific expert domain knowledge. Remarkably, Sym-NCO outperformed not only the existing DRL-NCO methods but also a competitive conventional solver, the iterative local search (ILS), in PCTSP at 240 faster speed. Our source code is available at https://github.com/alstn12088/Sym-NCO.  ( 2 min )

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a highly effective regularization technique for improving the generalization of deep neural networks for various settings. However, the underlying working of SAM remains elusive because of various intriguing approximations in the theoretical characterizations. SAM intends to penalize a notion of sharpness of the model but implements a computationally efficient variant; moreover, a third notion of sharpness was used for proving generalization guarantees. The subtle differences in these notions of sharpness can indeed lead to significantly different empirical results. This paper rigorously nails down the exact sharpness notion that SAM regularizes and clarifies the underlying mechanism. We also show that the two steps of approximations in the original motivation of SAM individually lead to inaccurate local conclusions, but their combination accidentally reveals the correct effect, when full-batch gradients are applied. Furthermore, we also prove that the stochastic version of SAM in fact regularizes the third notion of sharpness mentioned above, which is most likely to be the preferred notion for practical performance. The key mechanism behind this intriguing phenomenon is the alignment between the gradient and the top eigenvector of Hessian when SAM is applied.  ( 2 min )

Learning to navigate in a realistic setting where an agent must rely solely on visual inputs is a challenging task, in part because the lack of position information makes it difficult to provide supervision during training. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for learning to navigate from image inputs without external supervision or reward. Our approach consists of three stages: learning a good representation of first-person views, then learning to explore using memory, and finally learning to navigate by setting its own goals. The model is trained with intrinsic rewards only so that it can be applied to any environment with image observations. We show the benefits of our approach by training an agent to navigate challenging photo-realistic environments from the Gibson dataset with RGB inputs only.  ( 2 min )

Deep Learning systems need large data for training. Datasets for training face verification systems are difficult to obtain and prone to privacy issues. Synthetic data generated by generative models such as GANs can be a good alternative. However, we show that data generated from GANs are prone to bias and fairness issues. Specifically, GANs trained on FFHQ dataset show biased behavior towards generating white faces in the age group of 20-29. We also demonstrate that synthetic faces cause disparate impact, specifically for race attribute, when used for fine tuning face verification systems.  ( 2 min )

Content mismatch usually occurs when data from one modality is translated to another, e.g. language learners producing mispronunciations (errors in speech) when reading a sentence (target text) aloud. However, most existing alignment algorithms assume that the content involved in the two modalities is perfectly matched, thus leading to difficulty in locating such mismatch between speech and text. In this work, we develop an unsupervised learning algorithm that can infer the relationship between content-mismatched cross-modal sequential data, especially for speech-text sequences. More specifically, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian deep learning model, dubbed mismatch localization variational autoencoder (ML-VAE), which decomposes the generative process of the speech into hierarchically structured latent variables, indicating the relationship between the two modalities. Training such a model is very challenging due to the discrete latent variables with complex dependencies involved. To address this challenge, we propose a novel and effective training procedure that alternates between estimating the hard assignments of the discrete latent variables over a specifically designed mismatch localization finite-state acceptor (ML-FSA) and updating the parameters of neural networks. In this work, we focus on the mismatch localization problem for speech and text, and our experimental results show that ML-VAE successfully locates the mismatch between text and speech, without the need for human annotations for model training.  ( 2 min )

Sarcasm detection is an essential task that can help identify the actual sentiment in user-generated data, such as discussion forums or tweets. Sarcasm is a sophisticated form of linguistic expression because its surface meaning usually contradicts its inner, deeper meaning. Such incongruity is the essential component of sarcasm, however, it makes sarcasm detection quite a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a model, that incorporates different features to capture the incongruity intrinsic to sarcasm. We use a pre-trained transformer and CNN to capture context features, and we use transformers pre-trained on emotions detection and sentiment analysis tasks. Our approach outperformed previous state-of-the-art results on four datasets from social networking platforms and online media.  ( 2 min )

In addition to the shared weights of synaptic connections, PNN includes weights of synaptic ranges for Forward propagation and Back propagation[15,16,19-24]. PNN considers synaptic strength balance in dynamic of phagocytosing of synapses and static of constant sum of synapses length [15],the lead behavior of the school of fish is well embodied in our PNN. Synapse formation will inhibit dendrites generation to a certain extent in experiments, by simulations synapse formation will inhibit the function of dendrites [16]. Closing the critical period will cause neurological disorder in experiments, but worse results in PNN simulations [19]. The memory persistence gradient information of backward circuit similar to the Enforcing Resilience in a Spring Boot. The relatively good and inferior gradient information in synapse formation of backward circuit like the folds of the brain. Considering both negative and positive memories persistence help activate synapse length changes with iterations better than only considering positive memory. So using memory of fear learning and improving of synaptic activity to observe obviously [20]. Memory persistence factor also inhibit local synaptic accumulation. And refers PNN can also introduce the relatively good and inferior solution to update the velocity of particle in PSO. Astrocytic phagocytosis will avoid the local accumulation of synapses by simulation (Lack of astrocytic phagocytosis causes excitatory synapses and functionally impaired synapses accumulate in experiments and lead to destruction of cognition, but local longer synapses and worse results in PNN simulations) [21]. It gives relationship of human intelligence and cortical thickness, individual differences in brain[22].PNN also considered the memory engram cells that strengthened Synaptic strength[23]. The simple PNN which only has the synaptic phagocytosis.  ( 3 min )

We propose three novel pruning techniques to improve the cost and results of inference-aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS). First, we introduce Prunode, a stochastic bi-path building block for DNAS, which can search over inner hidden dimensions with O(1) memory and compute complexity. Second, we present an algorithm for pruning blocks within a stochastic layer of the SuperNet during the search. Third, we describe a novel technique for pruning unnecessary stochastic layers during the search. The optimized models resulting from the search are called PruNet and establishes a new state-of-the-art Pareto frontier for NVIDIA V100 in terms of inference latency for ImageNet Top-1 image classification accuracy. PruNet as a backbone also outperforms GPUNet and EfficientNet on the COCO object detection task on inference latency relative to mean Average Precision (mAP).  ( 2 min )

Low-dimensional representations, or embeddings, of a graph's nodes facilitate several practical data science and data engineering tasks. As such embeddings rely, explicitly or implicitly, on a similarity measure among nodes, they require the computation of a quadratic similarity matrix, inducing a tradeoff between space complexity and embedding quality. To date, no graph embedding work combines (i) linear space complexity, (ii) a nonlinear transform as its basis, and (iii) nontrivial quality guarantees. In this paper we introduce FREDE (FREquent Directions Embedding), a graph embedding based on matrix sketching that combines those three desiderata. Starting out from the observation that embedding methods aim to preserve the covariance among the rows of a similarity matrix}, FREDE iteratively improves on quality while individually processing rows of a nonlinearly transformed PPR similarity matrix derived from a state-of-the-art graph embedding method} and provides, at any iteration, column-covariance approximation guarantees in due course almost indistinguishable from those of the optimal approximation by SVD. Our experimental evaluation on variably sized networks shows that FREDE performs almost as well as SVD and competitively against state-of-the-art embedding methods in diverse data science tasks, even when it is based on as little as 10% of node similarities.  ( 2 min )

Detection of high impedance faults (HIF) has been one of the biggest challenges in the power distribution network. The low current magnitude and diverse characteristics of HIFs make them difficult to be detected by over-current relays. Recently, data-driven methods based on machine learning models are gaining popularity in HIF detection due to their capability to learn complex patterns from data. Most machine learning-based detection methods adopt supervised learning techniques to distinguish HIFs from normal load conditions by performing classifications, which rely on a large amount of data collected during HIF. However, measurements of HIF are difficult to acquire in the real world. As a result, the reliability and generalization of the classification methods are limited when the load profiles and faults are not present in the training data. Consequently, this paper proposes an unsupervised HIF detection framework using the autoencoder and principal component analysis-based monitoring techniques. The proposed fault detection method detects the HIF by monitoring the changes in correlation structure within the current waveforms that are different from the normal loads. The performance of the proposed HIF detection method is tested using real data collected from a 4.16 kV distribution system and compared with results from a commercially available solution for HIF detection. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the commercially available HIF detection technique while maintaining high security by not falsely detecting during load conditions.  ( 2 min )

Encoding methods are employed across several process mining tasks, including predictive process monitoring, anomalous case detection, trace clustering, etc. These methods are usually performed as preprocessing steps and are responsible for transforming complex information into a numerical feature space. Most papers choose existing encoding methods arbitrarily or employ a strategy based on a specific expert knowledge domain. Moreover, existing methods are employed by using their default hyperparameters without evaluating other options. This practice can lead to several drawbacks, such as suboptimal performance and unfair comparisons with the state-of-the-art. Therefore, this work aims at providing a comprehensive survey on event log encoding by comparing 27 methods, from different natures, in terms of expressivity, scalability, correlation, and domain agnosticism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study so far focusing on trace encoding in process mining. It contributes to maturing awareness about the role of trace encoding in process mining pipelines and sheds light on issues, concerns, and future research directions regarding the use of encoding methods to bridge the gap between machine learning models and process mining.  ( 2 min )

Implementing accurate Distribution System State Estimation (DSSE) faces several challenges, among which the lack of observability and the high density of the distribution system. While data-driven alternatives based on Machine Learning models could be a choice, they suffer in DSSE because of the lack of labeled data. In fact, measurements in the distribution system are often noisy, corrupted, and unavailable. To address these issues, we propose the Deep Statistical Solver for Distribution System State Estimation (DSS$^2$), a deep learning model based on graph neural networks (GNNs) that accounts for the network structure of the distribution system and for the physical governing power flow equations. DSS$^2$ leverages hypergraphs to represent the heterogeneous components of the distribution systems and updates their latent representations via a node-centric message-passing scheme. A weakly supervised learning approach is put forth to train the DSS$^2$ in a learning-to-optimize fashion w.r.t. the Weighted Least Squares loss with noisy measurements and pseudomeasurements. By enforcing the GNN output into the power flow equations and the latter into the loss function, we force the DSS$^2$ to respect the physics of the distribution system. This strategy enables learning from noisy measurements, acting as an implicit denoiser, and alleviating the need for ideal labeled data. Extensive experiments with case studies on the IEEE 14-bus, 70-bus, and 179-bus networks showed the DSS$^2$ outperforms by a margin the conventional Weighted Least Squares algorithm in accuracy, convergence, and computational time, while being more robust to noisy, erroneous, and missing measurements. The DSS$^2$ achieves a competing, yet lower, performance compared with the supervised models that rely on the unrealistic assumption of having all the true labels.  ( 2 min )

The prevalence of machine learning in biomedical research is rapidly growing, yet the trustworthiness of such research is often overlooked. While some previous works have investigated the ability of adversarial attacks to degrade model performance in medical imaging, the ability to falsely improve performance via recently-developed "enhancement attacks" may be a greater threat to biomedical machine learning. In the spirit of developing attacks to better understand trustworthiness, we developed three techniques to drastically enhance prediction performance of classifiers with minimal changes to features, including the enhancement of 1) within-dataset predictions, 2) a particular method over another, and 3) cross-dataset generalization. Our within-dataset enhancement framework falsely improved classifiers' accuracy from 50% to almost 100% while maintaining high feature similarities between original and enhanced data (Pearson's r's>0.99). Similarly, the method-specific enhancement framework was effective in falsely improving the performance of one method over another. For example, a simple neural network outperformed LR by 50% on our enhanced dataset, although no performance differences were present in the original dataset. Crucially, the original and enhanced data were still similar (r=0.95). Finally, we demonstrated that enhancement is not specific to within-dataset predictions but can also be adapted to enhance the generalization accuracy of one dataset to another by up to 38%. Overall, our results suggest that more robust data sharing and provenance tracking pipelines are necessary to maintain data integrity in biomedical machine learning research.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we formulate inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as an expert-learner interaction whereby the optimal performance intent of an expert or target agent is unknown to a learner agent. The learner observes the states and controls of the expert and hence seeks to reconstruct the expert's cost function intent and thus mimics the expert's optimal response. Next, we add non-cooperative disturbances that seek to disrupt the learning and stability of the learner agent. This leads to the formulation of a new interaction we call zero-sum game IRL. We develop a framework to solve the zero-sum game IRL problem that is a modified extension of RL policy iteration (PI) to allow unknown expert performance intentions to be computed and non-cooperative disturbances to be rejected. The framework has two parts: a value function and control action update based on an extension of PI, and a cost function update based on standard inverse optimal control. Then, we eventually develop an off-policy IRL algorithm that does not require knowledge of the expert and learner agent dynamics and performs single-loop learning. Rigorous proofs and analyses are given. Finally, simulation experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the new approach.  ( 2 min )

Communication can impressively improve cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), especially for partially-observed tasks. However, existing works either broadcast the messages leading to information redundancy, or learn targeted communication by modeling all the other agents as targets, which is not scalable when the number of agents varies. In this work, to tackle the scalability problem of MARL communication for partially-observed tasks, we propose a novel framework Transformer-based Email Mechanism (TEM). The agents adopt local communication to send messages only to the ones that can be observed without modeling all the agents. Inspired by human cooperation with email forwarding, we design message chains to forward information to cooperate with the agents outside the observation range. We introduce Transformer to encode and decode the message chain to choose the next receiver selectively. Empirically, TEM outperforms the baselines on multiple cooperative MARL benchmarks. When the number of agents varies, TEM maintains superior performance without further training.  ( 2 min )

We propose StitchNet, a novel neural network creation paradigm that stitches together fragments (one or more consecutive network layers) from multiple pre-trained neural networks. StitchNet allows the creation of high-performing neural networks without the large compute and data requirements needed under traditional model creation processes via backpropagation training. We leverage Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) as a compatibility measure to efficiently guide the selection of these fragments in composing a network for a given task tailored to specific accuracy needs and computing resource constraints. We then show that these fragments can be stitched together to create neural networks with comparable accuracy to traditionally trained networks at a fraction of computing resource and data requirements. Finally, we explore a novel on-the-fly personalized model creation and inference application enabled by this new paradigm.  ( 2 min )

We introduce a general framework for Markov decision problems under model uncertainty in a discrete-time infinite horizon setting. By providing a dynamic programming principle we obtain a local-to-global paradigm, namely solving a local, i.e., a one time-step robust optimization problem leads to an optimizer of the global (i.e. infinite time-steps) robust stochastic optimal control problem, as well as to a corresponding worst-case measure. Moreover, we apply this framework to portfolio optimization involving data of the S&P 500. We present two different types of ambiguity sets; one is fully data-driven given by a Wasserstein-ball around the empirical measure, the second one is described by a parametric set of multivariate normal distributions, where the corresponding uncertainty sets of the parameters are estimated from the data. It turns out that in scenarios where the market is volatile or bearish, the optimal portfolio strategies from the corresponding robust optimization problem outperforms the ones without model uncertainty, showcasing the importance of taking model uncertainty into account.  ( 2 min )

Diffusion condensation is a dynamic process that yields a sequence of multiscale data representations that aim to encode meaningful abstractions. It has proven effective for manifold learning, denoising, clustering, and visualization of high-dimensional data. Diffusion condensation is constructed as a time-inhomogeneous process where each step first computes and then applies a diffusion operator to the data. We theoretically analyze the convergence and evolution of this process from geometric, spectral, and topological perspectives. From a geometric perspective, we obtain convergence bounds based on the smallest transition probability and the radius of the data, whereas from a spectral perspective, our bounds are based on the eigenspectrum of the diffusion kernel. Our spectral results are of particular interest since most of the literature on data diffusion is focused on homogeneous processes. From a topological perspective, we show diffusion condensation generalizes centroid-based hierarchical clustering. We use this perspective to obtain a bound based on the number of data points, independent of their location. To understand the evolution of the data geometry beyond convergence, we use topological data analysis. We show that the condensation process itself defines an intrinsic condensation homology. We use this intrinsic topology as well as the ambient persistent homology of the condensation process to study how the data changes over diffusion time. We demonstrate both types of topological information in well-understood toy examples. Our work gives theoretical insights into the convergence of diffusion condensation, and shows that it provides a link between topological and geometric data analysis.  ( 2 min )

WQMIX, QMIX, QTRAN, and VDN are SOTA algorithms for Dec-POMDP. All of them cannot solve complex agents' cooperation domains. We give an algorithm to solve such problems. In the first stage, we solve a single-agent problem and get a policy. In the second stage, we solve the multi-agent problem with the single-agent policy. SA2MA has a clear advantage over all competitors in complex agents' cooperative domains.  ( 2 min )

In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a count-based episodic term in their exploration bonus. As a result, despite their success in relatively simple, noise-free settings, these methods fall short in more realistic scenarios where the state space is vast and prone to noise. To address this limitation, we introduce Exploration via Elliptical Episodic Bonuses (E3B), a new method which extends count-based episodic bonuses to continuous state spaces and encourages an agent to explore states that are diverse under a learned embedding within each episode. The embedding is learned using an inverse dynamics model in order to capture controllable aspects of the environment. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art across 16 challenging tasks from the MiniHack suite, without requiring task-specific inductive biases. E3B also matches existing methods on sparse reward, pixel-based VizDoom environments, and outperforms existing methods in reward-free exploration on Habitat, demonstrating that it can scale to high-dimensional pixel-based observations and realistic environments.  ( 2 min )

Self-supervised learning has shown impressive results in downstream classification tasks. However, there is limited work in understanding their failure modes and interpreting their learned representations. In this paper, we study the representation space of six state-of-the-art self-supervised models including SimCLR, SwaV, MoCo, BYOL, DINO and SimSiam. Without the use of class label information, we discover highly activating features that correspond to unique physical attributes in images and exist mostly in correctly-classified representations. Using these features, we propose Self-Supervised Representation Quality Score (or Q-Score), a model-agnostic, unsupervised score that can reliably predict if a given sample is likely to be mis-classified during linear evaluation, achieving AUPRC of 91.45 on ImageNet-100 and 78.78 on ImageNet-1K. Q-Score can also be used as a regularization term on any self-supervised model to remedy low-quality representations through the course of pre-training. We show that pre-training with Q-Score regularization can boost the performance of six state-of-the-art self-supervised models on ImageNet-1K, ImageNet-100, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and STL-10, showing an average relative increase of 1.8% top-1 accuracy on linear evaluation. On ImageNet-100, BYOL shows 7.2% relative improvement and on ImageNet-1K, SimCLR shows 4.7% relative improvement compared to their baselines. Finally, using gradient heatmaps and Salient ImageNet masks, we define a metric to quantify the interpretability of each representation. We show that highly activating features are strongly correlated to core attributes and enhancing these features through Q-score regularization improves the overall representation interpretability for all self-supervised models.  ( 2 min )

Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the minimum binding energy - the adsorption energy - for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations more accurately and efficiently. Our algorithm provides a spectrum of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration, within a 0.1 eV threshold, 86.33% of the time, while achieving a 1331x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 85,658 unique configurations.  ( 2 min )

The Transformer architecture yields state-of-the-art results in many tasks such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), since the ability to efficiently capture the precise long-range dependency coupling between input sequences. With this advanced capability, however, the quadratic time complexity and high memory usage prevents the Transformer from dealing with long time-series forecasting problem (LTFP). To address these difficulties: (i) we revisit the learned attention patterns of the vanilla self-attention, redesigned the calculation method of self-attention based the Maximum Entropy Principle. (ii) we propose a new method to sparse the self-attention, which can prevent the loss of more important self-attention scores due to random sampling.(iii) We propose Keys/Values Distilling method motivated that a large amount of feature in the original self-attention map is redundant, which can further reduce the time and spatial complexity and make it possible to input longer time-series. Finally, we propose a method that combines the encoder-decoder architecture with seasonal-trend decomposition, i.e., using the encoder-decoder architecture to capture more specific seasonal parts. A large number of experiments on several large-scale datasets show that our Infomaxformer is obviously superior to the existing methods. We expect this to open up a new solution for Transformer to solve LTFP, and exploring the ability of the Transformer architecture to capture much longer temporal dependencies.  ( 2 min )

Sequential Bayesian inference can be used for continual learning to prevent catastrophic forgetting of past tasks and provide an informative prior when learning new tasks. We revisit sequential Bayesian inference and test whether having access to the true posterior is guaranteed to prevent catastrophic forgetting in Bayesian neural networks. To do this we perform sequential Bayesian inference using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We propagate the posterior as a prior for new tasks by fitting a density estimator on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo samples. We find that this approach fails to prevent catastrophic forgetting demonstrating the difficulty in performing sequential Bayesian inference in neural networks. From there we study simple analytical examples of sequential Bayesian inference and CL and highlight the issue of model misspecification which can lead to sub-optimal continual learning performance despite exact inference. Furthermore, we discuss how task data imbalances can cause forgetting. From these limitations, we argue that we need probabilistic models of the continual learning generative process rather than relying on sequential Bayesian inference over Bayesian neural network weights. In this vein, we also propose a simple baseline called Prototypical Bayesian Continual Learning, which is competitive with state-of-the-art Bayesian continual learning methods on class incremental continual learning vision benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

Developing agents that can execute multiple skills by learning from pre-collected datasets is an important problem in robotics, where online interaction with the environment is extremely time-consuming. Moreover, manually designing reward functions for every single desired skill is prohibitive. Prior works targeted these challenges by learning goal-conditioned policies from offline datasets without manually specified rewards, through hindsight relabelling. These methods suffer from the issue of sparsity of rewards, and fail at long-horizon tasks. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised learning phase on the pre-collected dataset to understand the structure and the dynamics of the model, and shape a dense reward function for learning policies offline. We evaluate our method on three continuous control tasks, and show that our model significantly outperforms existing approaches, especially on tasks that involve long-term planning.  ( 2 min )

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging learning paradigm that computes with high dimensional binary vectors. It is attractive because of its energy efficiency and low latency, especially on emerging hardware -- but HDC suffers from low model accuracy, with little theoretical understanding of what limits its performance. We propose a new theoretical analysis of the limits of HDC via a consideration of what similarity matrices can be "expressed" by binary vectors, and we show how the limits of HDC can be approached using random Fourier features (RFF). We extend our analysis to the more general class of vector symbolic architectures (VSA), which compute with high-dimensional vectors (hypervectors) that are not necessarily binary. We propose a new class of VSAs, finite group VSAs, which surpass the limits of HDC. Using representation theory, we characterize which similarity matrices can be "expressed" by finite group VSA hypervectors, and we show how these VSAs can be constructed. Experimental results show that our RFF method and group VSA can both outperform the state-of-the-art HDC model by up to 7.6\% while maintaining hardware efficiency.  ( 2 min )

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems, where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball around a (possibly estimated) reference measure. We prove convergence of the presented algorithm and provide several examples also using real data to illustrate both the tractability of our algorithm as well as the benefits of considering distributional robustness when solving stochastic optimal control problems, in particular when the estimated distributions turn out to be misspecified in practice.  ( 2 min )

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical model since the existing methods tend to solve hard optimization problems directly. Inspired by a first-order optimization method called mirror descent, this paper proposes to predict a sequence of reward functions, which are iterative solutions for a constrained convex problem. IRL solutions derived by mirror descent are tolerant to the uncertainty incurred by target density estimation since the amount of reward learning is regulated with respect to local geometric constraints. We prove that the proposed mirror descent update rule ensures robust minimization of a Bregman divergence in terms of a rigorous regret bound of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$ for step sizes $\{\eta_t\}_{t=1}^{T}$. Our IRL method was applied on top of an adversarial framework, and it outperformed existing adversarial methods in an extensive suite of benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

The vanishing ideal of a set of points $X\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ is the set of polynomials that evaluate to $0$ over all points $\mathbf{x} \in X$ and admits an efficient representation by a finite set of polynomials called generators. To accommodate the noise in the data set, we introduce the pairwise conditional gradients approximate vanishing ideal algorithm (PCGAVI) that constructs a set of generators of the approximate vanishing ideal. The constructed generators capture polynomial structures in data and give rise to a feature map that can, for example, be used in combination with a linear classifier for supervised learning. In PCGAVI, we construct the set of generators by solving constrained convex optimization problems with the pairwise conditional gradients algorithm. Thus, PCGAVI not only constructs few but also sparse generators, making the corresponding feature transformation robust and compact. Furthermore, we derive several learning guarantees for PCGAVI that make the algorithm theoretically better motivated than related generator-constructing methods.  ( 2 min )

Likelihood-based deep generative models have recently been shown to exhibit pathological behaviour under the manifold hypothesis as a consequence of using high-dimensional densities to model data with low-dimensional structure. In this paper we propose two methodologies aimed at addressing this problem. Both are based on adding Gaussian noise to the data to remove the dimensionality mismatch during training, and both provide a denoising mechanism whose goal is to sample from the model as though no noise had been added to the data. Our first approach is based on Tweedie's formula, and the second on models which take the variance of added noise as a conditional input. We show that surprisingly, while well motivated, these approaches only sporadically improve performance over not adding noise, and that other methods of addressing the dimensionality mismatch are more empirically adequate.  ( 2 min )

Decoding stimuli or behaviour from recorded neural activity is a common approach to interrogate brain function in research, and an essential part of brain-computer and brain-machine interfaces. Reliable decoding even from small neural populations is possible because high dimensional neural population activity typically occupies low dimensional manifolds that are discoverable with suitable latent variable models. Over time however, drifts in activity of individual neurons and instabilities in neural recording devices can be substantial, making stable decoding over days and weeks impractical. While this drift cannot be predicted on an individual neuron level, population level variations over consecutive recording sessions such as differing sets of neurons and varying permutations of consistent neurons in recorded data may be learnable when the underlying manifold is stable over time. Classification of consistent versus unfamiliar neurons across sessions and accounting for deviations in the order of consistent recording neurons in recording datasets over sessions of recordings may then maintain decoding performance. In this work we show that self-supervised training of a deep neural network can be used to compensate for this inter-session variability. As a result, a sequential autoencoding model can maintain state-of-the-art behaviour decoding performance for completely unseen recording sessions several days into the future. Our approach only requires a single recording session for training the model, and is a step towards reliable, recalibration-free brain computer interfaces.  ( 2 min )

Logic-based machine learning aims to learn general, interpretable knowledge in a data-efficient manner. However, labelled data must be specified in a structured logical form. To address this limitation, we propose a neural-symbolic learning framework, called Feed-Forward Neural-Symbolic Learner (FFNSL), that integrates a logic-based machine learning system capable of learning from noisy examples, with neural networks, in order to learn interpretable knowledge from labelled unstructured data. We demonstrate the generality of FFNSL on four neural-symbolic classification problems, where different pre-trained neural network models and logic-based machine learning systems are integrated to learn interpretable knowledge from sequences of images. We evaluate the robustness of our framework by using images subject to distributional shifts, for which the pre-trained neural networks may predict incorrectly and with high confidence. We analyse the impact that these shifts have on the accuracy of the learned knowledge and run-time performance, comparing FFNSL to tree-based and pure neural approaches. Our experimental results show that FFNSL outperforms the baselines by learning more accurate and interpretable knowledge with fewer examples.  ( 2 min )

Symmetries built into a neural network have appeared to be very beneficial for a wide range of tasks as it saves the data to learn them. We depart from the position that when symmetries are not built into a model a priori, it is advantageous for robust networks to learn symmetries directly from the data to fit a task function. In this paper, we present a method to extract symmetries learned by a neural network and to evaluate the degree to which a network is invariant to them. With our method, we are able to explicitly retrieve learned invariances in a form of the generators of corresponding Lie-groups without prior knowledge of symmetries in the data. We use the proposed method to study how symmetrical properties depend on a neural network's parameterization and configuration. We found that the ability of a network to learn symmetries generalizes over a range of architectures. However, the quality of learned symmetries depends on the depth and the number of parameters.  ( 2 min )

Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis (TRPCA), which aims to recover a low-rank tensor corrupted by sparse noise, has attracted much attention in many real applications. This paper develops a new Global Weighted TRPCA method (GWTRPCA), which is the first approach simultaneously considers the significance of intra-frontal slice and inter-frontal slice singular values in the Fourier domain. Exploiting this global information, GWTRPCA penalizes the larger singular values less and assigns smaller weights to them. Hence, our method can recover the low-tubal-rank components more exactly. Moreover, we propose an effective adaptive weight learning strategy by a Modified Cauchy Estimator (MCE) since the weight setting plays a crucial role in the success of GWTRPCA. To implement the GWTRPCA method, we devise an optimization algorithm using an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) method. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.  ( 2 min )

This study constructs machine learning algorithms that are trained to classify samples using sound symbolism, and then it reports on an experiment designed to measure their understanding against human participants. Random forests are trained using the names of Pokemon, which are fictional video game characters, and their evolutionary status. Pokemon undergo evolution when certain in-game conditions are met. Evolution changes the appearance, abilities, and names of Pokemon. In the first experiment, we train three random forests using the sounds that make up the names of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Pokemon to classify Pokemon into pre-evolution and post-evolution categories. We then train a fourth random forest using the results of an elicitation experiment whereby Japanese participants named previously unseen Pokemon. In Experiment 2, we reproduce those random forests with name length as a feature and compare the performance of the random forests against humans in a classification experiment whereby Japanese participants classified the names elicited in Experiment 1 into pre-and post-evolution categories. Experiment 2 reveals an issue pertaining to overfitting in Experiment 1 which we resolve using a novel cross-validation method. The results show that the random forests are efficient learners of systematic sound-meaning correspondence patterns and can classify samples with greater accuracy than the human participants.  ( 2 min )

Although a concept class may be learnt more efficiently using quantum samples as compared with classical samples in certain scenarios, Arunachalam and de Wolf (JMLR, 2018) proved that quantum learners are asymptotically no more efficient than classical ones in the quantum PAC and Agnostic learning models. They established lower bounds on sample complexity via quantum state identification and Fourier analysis. In this paper, we derive optimal lower bounds for quantum sample complexity in both the PAC and agnostic models via an information-theoretic approach. The proofs are arguably simpler, and the same ideas can potentially be used to derive optimal bounds for other problems in quantum learning theory. We then turn to a quantum analogue of the Coupon Collector problem, a classic problem from probability theory also of importance in the study of PAC learning. Arunachalam, Belovs, Childs, Kothari, Rosmanis, and de Wolf (TQC, 2020) characterized the quantum sample complexity of this problem up to constant factors. First, we show that the information-theoretic approach mentioned above provably does not yield the optimal lower bound. As a by-product, we get a natural ensemble of pure states in arbitrarily high dimensions which are not easily (simultaneously) distinguishable, while the ensemble has close to maximal Holevo information. Second, we discover that the information-theoretic approach yields an asymptotically optimal bound for an approximation variant of the problem. Finally, we derive a sharp lower bound for the Quantum Coupon Collector problem, with the exact leading order term, via the Holevo-Curlander bounds on the distinguishability of an ensemble. All the aspects of the Quantum Coupon Collector problem we study rest on properties of the spectrum of the associated Gram matrix, which may be of independent interest.  ( 3 min )

Exploiting image patches instead of whole images have proved to be a powerful approach to tackle various problems in image processing. Recently, Wasserstein patch priors (WPP), which are based on the comparison of the patch distributions of the unknown image and a reference image, were successfully used as data-driven regularizers in the variational formulation of superresolution. However, for each input image, this approach requires the solution of a non-convex minimization problem which is computationally costly. In this paper, we propose to learn two kind of neural networks in an unsupervised way based on WPP loss functions. First, we show how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be incorporated. Once the network, called WPPNet, is learned, it can be very efficiently applied to any input image. Second, we incorporate conditional normalizing flows to provide a tool for uncertainty quantification. Numerical examples demonstrate the very good performance of WPPNets for superresolution in various image classes even if the forward operator is known only approximately.  ( 2 min )

Cold temperatures during fall and spring have the potential to cause frost damage to grapevines and other fruit plants, which can significantly decrease harvest yields. To help prevent these losses, farmers deploy expensive frost mitigation measures such as sprinklers, heaters, and wind machines when they judge that damage may occur. This judgment, however, is challenging because the cold hardiness of plants changes throughout the dormancy period and it is difficult to directly measure. This has led scientists to develop cold hardiness prediction models that can be tuned to different grape cultivars based on laborious field measurement data. In this paper, we study whether deep learning models can improve cold hardiness prediction for grapes based on data that has been collected over a 30-year time period. A key challenge is that the amount of data per cultivar is highly variable, with some cultivars having only a small amount. For this purpose, we investigate the use of multi-task learning to leverage data across cultivars in order to improve prediction performance for individual cultivars. We evaluate a number of multi-task learning approaches and show that the highest performing approach is able to significantly improve over learning for single cultivars and outperforms the current state-of-the-art scientific model for most cultivars.  ( 2 min )

Existing gradient-based optimization methods update parameters locally, in a direction that minimizes the loss function. We study a different approach, symmetry teleportation, that allows parameters to travel a large distance on the loss level set, in order to improve the convergence speed in subsequent steps. Teleportation exploits symmetries in the loss landscape of optimization problems. We derive loss-invariant group actions for test functions in optimization and multi-layer neural networks, and prove a necessary condition for teleportation to improve convergence rate. We also show that our algorithm is closely related to second order methods. Experimentally, we show that teleportation improves the convergence speed of gradient descent and AdaGrad for several optimization problems including test functions, multi-layer regressions, and MNIST classification.  ( 2 min )

Although machine learning on hypergraphs has attracted considerable attention, most of the works have focused on (semi-)supervised learning, which may cause heavy labeling costs and poor generalization. Recently, contrastive learning has emerged as a successful unsupervised representation learning method. Despite the prosperous development of contrastive learning in other domains, contrastive learning on hypergraphs remains little explored. In this paper, we propose TriCL (Tri-directional Contrastive Learning), a general framework for contrastive learning on hypergraphs. Its main idea is tri-directional contrast, and specifically, it aims to maximize in two augmented views the agreement (a) between the same node, (b) between the same group of nodes, and (c) between each group and its members. Together with simple but surprisingly effective data augmentation and negative sampling schemes, these three forms of contrast enable TriCL to capture both microscopic and mesoscopic structural information in node embeddings. Our extensive experiments using 13 baseline approaches, five datasets, and two tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of TriCL, and most noticeably, TriCL consistently outperforms not just unsupervised competitors but also (semi-)supervised competitors mostly by significant margins for node classification. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/wooner49/TriCL.  ( 2 min )

Inverse problems exist in a wide variety of physical domains from aerospace engineering to medical imaging. The goal is to infer the underlying state from a set of observations. When the forward model that produced the observations is nonlinear and stochastic, solving the inverse problem is very challenging. Neural networks are an appealing solution for solving inverse problems as they can be trained from noisy data and once trained are computationally efficient to run. However, inverse model neural networks do not have guarantees of correctness built-in, which makes them unreliable for use in safety and accuracy-critical contexts. In this work we introduce a method for verifying the correctness of inverse model neural networks. Our approach is to overapproximate a nonlinear, stochastic forward model with piecewise linear constraints and encode both the overapproximate forward model and the neural network inverse model as a mixed-integer program. We demonstrate this verification procedure on a real-world airplane fuel gauge case study. The ability to verify and consequently trust inverse model neural networks allows their use in a wide variety of contexts, from aerospace to medicine.  ( 2 min )

Learning interpretable communication is essential for multi-agent and human-agent teams (HATs). In multi-agent reinforcement learning for partially-observable environments, agents may convey information to others via learned communication, allowing the team to complete its task. Inspired by human languages, recent works study discrete (using only a finite set of tokens) and sparse (communicating only at some time-steps) communication. However, the utility of such communication in human-agent team experiments has not yet been investigated. In this work, we analyze the efficacy of sparse-discrete methods for producing emergent communication that enables high agent-only and human-agent team performance. We develop agent-only teams that communicate sparsely via our scheme of Enforcers that sufficiently constrain communication to any budget. Our results show no loss or minimal loss of performance in benchmark environments and tasks. In human-agent teams tested in benchmark environments, where agents have been modeled using the Enforcers, we find that a prototype-based method produces meaningful discrete tokens that enable human partners to learn agent communication faster and better than a one-hot baseline. Additional HAT experiments show that an appropriate sparsity level lowers the cognitive load of humans when communicating with teams of agents and leads to superior team performance.  ( 2 min )

The degree to which subjects differ from each other with respect to certain properties measured by a set of variables, plays an important role in many statistical methods. For example, classification, clustering, and data visualization methods all require a quantification of differences in the observed values. We can refer to the quantification of such differences, as distance. An appropriate definition of a distance depends on the nature of the data and the problem at hand. For distances between numerical variables, there exist many definitions that depend on the size of the observed differences. For categorical data, the definition of a distance is more complex, as there is no straightforward quantification of the size of the observed differences. Consequently, many proposals exist that can be used to measure differences based on categorical variables. In this paper, we introduce a general framework that allows for an efficient and transparent implementation of distances between observations on categorical variables. We show that several existing distances can be incorporated into the framework. Moreover, our framework quite naturally leads to the introduction of new distance formulations and allows for the implementation of flexible, case and data specific distance definitions. Furthermore, in a supervised classification setting, the framework can be used to construct distances that incorporate the association between the response and predictor variables and hence improve the performance of distance-based classifiers.  ( 2 min )

Deploying TinyML models on low-cost IoT hardware is very challenging, due to limited device memory capacity. Neural processing unit (NPU) hardware address the memory challenge by using model compression to exploit weight quantization and sparsity to fit more parameters in the same footprint. However, designing compressible neural networks (NNs) is challenging, as it expands the design space across which we must make balanced trade-offs. This paper demonstrates Unified DNAS for Compressible (UDC) NNs, which explores a large search space to generate state-of-the-art compressible NNs for NPU. ImageNet results show UDC networks are up to $3.35\times$ smaller (iso-accuracy) or 6.25% more accurate (iso-model size) than previous work.  ( 2 min )

We introduce multi-head neural networks (MH-NNs) to physics-informed machine learning, which is a type of neural networks (NNs) with all nonlinear hidden layers as the body and multiple linear output layers as multi-head. Hence, we construct multi-head physics-informed neural networks (MH-PINNs) as a potent tool for multi-task learning (MTL), generative modeling, and few-shot learning for diverse problems in scientific machine learning (SciML). MH-PINNs connect multiple functions/tasks via a shared body as the basis functions as well as a shared distribution for the head. The former is accomplished by solving multiple tasks with MH-PINNs with each head independently corresponding to each task, while the latter by employing normalizing flows (NFs) for density estimate and generative modeling. To this end, our method is a two-stage method, and both stages can be tackled with standard deep learning tools of NNs, enabling easy implementation in practice. MH-PINNs can be used for various purposes, such as approximating stochastic processes, solving multiple tasks synergistically, providing informative prior knowledge for downstream few-shot learning tasks such as meta-learning and transfer learning, learning representative basis functions, and uncertainty quantification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MH-PINNs in five benchmarks, investigating also the possibility of synergistic learning in regression analysis. We name the open-source code "Lernaean Hydra" (L-HYDRA), since this mythical creature possessed many heads for performing important multiple tasks, as in the proposed method.  ( 2 min )

We describe three models submitted for the CODI-CRAC 2022 shared task. To perform identity anaphora resolution, we test several combinations of the incremental clustering approach based on the Workspace Coreference System (WCS) with other coreference models. The best result is achieved by adding the ''cluster merging'' version of the coref-hoi model, which brings up to 10.33% improvement 1 over vanilla WCS clustering. Discourse deixis resolution is implemented as multi-task learning: we combine the learning objective of corefhoi with anaphor type classification. We adapt the higher-order resolution model introduced in Joshi et al. (2019) for bridging resolution given gold mentions and anaphors.  ( 2 min )

In data-parallel optimization of machine learning models, workers collaborate to improve their estimates of the model: more accurate gradients allow them to use larger learning rates and optimize faster. In the decentralized setting, in which workers communicate over a sparse graph, current theory fails to capture important aspects of real-world behavior. First, the `spectral gap' of the communication graph is not predictive of its empirical performance in (deep) learning. Second, current theory does not explain that collaboration enables larger learning rates than training alone. In fact, it prescribes smaller learning rates, which further decrease as graphs become larger, failing to explain convergence dynamics in infinite graphs. This paper aims to paint an accurate picture of sparsely-connected distributed optimization. We quantify how the graph topology influences convergence in a quadratic toy problem and provide theoretical results for general smooth and (strongly) convex objectives. Our theory matches empirical observations in deep learning, and accurately describes the relative merits of different graph topologies. This paper is an extension of the conference paper by Vogels et. al. (2022). Code: https://github.com/epfml/topology-in-decentralized-learning.  ( 2 min )

The solution of multistage stochastic linear problems (MSLP) represents a challenge for many application areas. Long-term hydrothermal dispatch planning (LHDP) materializes this challenge in a real-world problem that affects electricity markets, economies, and natural resources worldwide. No closed-form solutions are available for MSLP and the definition of non-anticipative policies with high-quality out-of-sample performance is crucial. Linear decision rules (LDR) provide an interesting simulation-based framework for finding high-quality policies for MSLP through two-stage stochastic models. In practical applications, however, the number of parameters to be estimated when using an LDR may be close to or higher than the number of scenarios of the sample average approximation problem, thereby generating an in-sample overfit and poor performances in out-of-sample simulations. In this paper, we propose a novel regularized LDR to solve MSLP based on the AdaLASSO (adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator). The goal is to use the parsimony principle, as largely studied in high-dimensional linear regression models, to obtain better out-of-sample performance for LDR applied to MSLP. Computational experiments show that the overfit threat is non-negligible when using classical non-regularized LDR to solve the LHDP, one of the most studied MSLP with relevant applications. Our analysis highlights the following benefits of the proposed framework in comparison to the non-regularized benchmark: 1) significant reductions in the number of non-zero coefficients (model parsimony), 2) substantial cost reductions in out-of-sample evaluations, and 3) improved spot-price profiles.  ( 3 min )

The recent spike in certified Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for healthcare has renewed the debate around adoption of this technology. One thread of such debate concerns Explainable AI and its promise to render AI devices more transparent and trustworthy. A few voices active in the medical AI space have expressed concerns on the reliability of Explainable AI techniques and especially feature attribution methods, questioning their use and inclusion in guidelines and standards. Despite valid concerns, we argue that existing criticism on the viability of post-hoc local explainability methods throws away the baby with the bathwater by generalizing a problem that is specific to image data. We begin by characterizing the problem as a lack of semantic match between explanations and human understanding. To understand when feature importance can be used reliably, we introduce a distinction between feature importance of low- and high-level features. We argue that for data types where low-level features come endowed with a clear semantics, such as tabular data like Electronic Health Records (EHRs), semantic match can be obtained, and thus feature attribution methods can still be employed in a meaningful and useful way.  ( 2 min )

Autonomous manipulation systems operating in domains where human intervention is difficult or impossible (e.g., underwater, extraterrestrial or hazardous environments) require a high degree of robustness to sensing and communication failures. Crucially, motion planning and control algorithms require a stream of accurate joint angle data provided by joint encoders, the failure of which may result in an unrecoverable loss of functionality. In this paper, we present a novel method for retrieving the joint angles of a robot manipulator using only a single RGB image of its current configuration, opening up an avenue for recovering system functionality when conventional proprioceptive sensing is unavailable. Our approach, based on a distance-geometric representation of the configuration space, exploits the knowledge of a robot's kinematic model with the goal of training a shallow neural network that performs a 2D-to-3D regression of distances associated with detected structural keypoints. It is shown that the resulting Euclidean distance matrix uniquely corresponds to the observed configuration, where joint angles can be recovered via multidimensional scaling and a simple inverse kinematics procedure. We evaluate the performance of our approach on real RGB images of a Franka Emika Panda manipulator, showing that the proposed method is efficient and exhibits solid generalization ability. Furthermore, we show that our method can be easily combined with a dense refinement technique to obtain superior results.  ( 2 min )

We present a neural network approach to transfer the motion from a single image of an articulated object to a rest-state (i.e., unarticulated) 3D model. Our network learns to predict the object's pose, part segmentation, and corresponding motion parameters to reproduce the articulation shown in the input image. The network is composed of three distinct branches that take a shared joint image-shape embedding and is trained end-to-end. Unlike previous methods, our approach is independent of the topology of the object and can work with objects from arbitrary categories. Our method, trained with only synthetic data, can be used to automatically animate a mesh, infer motion from real images, and transfer articulation to functionally similar but geometrically distinct 3D models at test time.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing literature are developed in \textit{online} settings where the data are easy to collect or simulate. Motivated by high stake domains such as mobile health studies with limited and pre-collected data, in this paper, we study \textit{offline} reinforcement learning methods. To efficiently use these datasets for policy optimization, we propose a novel value enhancement method to improve the performance of a given initial policy computed by existing state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Specifically, when the initial policy is not consistent, our method will output a policy whose value is no worse and often better than that of the initial policy. When the initial policy is consistent, under some mild conditions, our method will yield a policy whose value converges to the optimal one at a faster rate than the initial policy, achieving the desired ``value enhancement" property. The proposed method is generally applicable to any parametrized policy that belongs to certain pre-specified function class (e.g., deep neural networks). Extensive numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method.  ( 2 min )

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (CMARL), it is critical for agents to achieve a balance between self-exploration and team collaboration. However, agents can hardly accomplish the team task without coordination and they would be trapped in a local optimum where easy cooperation is accessed without enough individual exploration. Recent works mainly concentrate on agents' coordinated exploration, which brings about the exponentially grown exploration of the state space. To address this issue, we propose Self-Motivated Multi-Agent Exploration (SMMAE), which aims to achieve success in team tasks by adaptively finding a trade-off between self-exploration and team cooperation. In SMMAE, we train an independent exploration policy for each agent to maximize their own visited state space. Each agent learns an adjustable exploration probability based on the stability of the joint team policy. The experiments on highly cooperative tasks in StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark (SMAC) demonstrate that SMMAE can explore task-related states more efficiently, accomplish coordinated behaviours and boost the learning performance.  ( 2 min )

Machine Learning-guided solutions for protein learning tasks have made significant headway in recent years. However, success in scientific discovery tasks is limited by the accessibility of well-defined and labeled in-domain data. To tackle the low-data constraint, recent adaptions of deep learning models pretrained on millions of protein sequences have shown promise; however, the construction of such domain-specific large-scale model is computationally expensive. Here, we propose Representation Learning via Dictionary Learning (R2DL), an end-to-end representation learning framework in which we reprogram deep models for alternate-domain tasks that can perform well on protein property prediction with significantly fewer training samples. R2DL reprograms a pretrained English language model to learn the embeddings of protein sequences, by learning a sparse linear mapping between English and protein sequence vocabulary embeddings. Our model can attain better accuracy and significantly improve the data efficiency by up to $10^5$ times over the baselines set by pretrained and standard supervised methods. To this end, we reprogram an off-the-shelf pre-trained English language transformer and benchmark it on a set of protein physicochemical prediction tasks (secondary structure, stability, homology, stability) as well as on a biomedically relevant set of protein function prediction tasks (antimicrobial, toxicity, antibody affinity).  ( 2 min )

Detecting "toxic" language in internet content is a pressing social and technical challenge. In this work, we focus on PERSPECTIVE from Jigsaw, a state-of-the-art tool that promises to score the "toxicity" of text, with a recent model update that claims impressive results (Lees et al., 2022). We seek to challenge certain normative claims about toxic language by proposing a new benchmark, Selected Adversarial SemanticS, or SASS. We evaluate PERSPECTIVE on SASS, and compare to low-effort alternatives, like zero-shot and few-shot GPT-3 prompt models, in binary classification settings. We find that PERSPECTIVE exhibits troubling shortcomings across a number of our toxicity categories. SASS provides a new tool for evaluating performance on previously undetected toxic language that avoids common normative pitfalls. Our work leads us to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions made by tools already in deployment for toxicity detection in order to anticipate and prevent disparate harms.  ( 2 min )

We show that regression predictions from linear and tree-based models can be represented as linear combinations of target instances in the training data. This also holds for models constructed as ensembles of trees, including Random Forests and Gradient Boosting Machines. The weights used in these linear combinations are measures of instance importance, complementing existing measures of feature importance, such as SHAP and LIME. We refer to these measures as AXIL weights (Additive eXplanations with Instance Loadings). Since AXIL weights are additive across instances, they offer both local and global explanations. Our work contributes to the broader effort to make machine learning predictions more interpretable and explainable.  ( 2 min )

Recent rapid development of sensor technology has allowed massive fine-grained time series (TS) data to be collected and set the foundation for the development of data-driven services and applications. During the process, data sharing is often involved to allow the third-party modelers to perform specific time series data mining (TSDM) tasks based on the need of data owner. The high resolution of TS brings new challenges in protecting privacy. While meaningful information in high-resolution TS shifts from concrete point values to local shape-based segments, numerous research have found that long shape-based patterns could contain more sensitive information and may potentially be extracted and misused by a malicious third party. However, the privacy issue for TS patterns is surprisingly seldom explored in privacy-preserving literature. In this work, we consider a new privacy-preserving problem: preventing malicious inference on long shape-based patterns while preserving short segment information for the utility task performance. To mitigate the challenge, we investigate an alternative approach by sharing Matrix Profile (MP), which is a non-linear transformation of original data and a versatile data structure that supports many data mining tasks. We found that while MP can prevent concrete shape leakage, the canonical correlation in MP index can still reveal the location of sensitive long pattern. Based on this observation, we design two attacks named Location Attack and Entropy Attack to extract the pattern location from MP. To further protect MP from these two attacks, we propose a Privacy-Aware Matrix Profile (PMP) via perturbing the local correlation and breaking the canonical correlation in MP index vector. We evaluate our proposed PMP against baseline noise-adding methods through quantitative analysis and real-world case studies to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.  ( 2 min )

Grapevine budbreak is a key phenological stage of seasonal development, which serves as a signal for the onset of active growth. This is also when grape plants are most vulnerable to damage from freezing temperatures. Hence, it is important for winegrowers to anticipate the day of budbreak occurrence to protect their vineyards from late spring frost events. This work investigates deep learning for budbreak prediction using data collected for multiple grape cultivars. While some cultivars have over 30 seasons of data others have as little as 4 seasons, which can adversely impact prediction accuracy. To address this issue, we investigate multi-task learning, which combines data across all cultivars to make predictions for individual cultivars. Our main result shows that several variants of multi-task learning are all able to significantly improve prediction accuracy compared to learning for each cultivar independently.  ( 2 min )

Long-term time-series forecasting (LTTF) has become a pressing demand in many applications, such as wind power supply planning. Transformer models have been adopted to deliver high prediction capacity because of the high computational self-attention mechanism. Though one could lower the complexity of Transformers by inducing the sparsity in point-wise self-attentions for LTTF, the limited information utilization prohibits the model from exploring the complex dependencies comprehensively. To this end, we propose an efficient Transformerbased model, named Conformer, which differentiates itself from existing methods for LTTF in three aspects: (i) an encoder-decoder architecture incorporating a linear complexity without sacrificing information utilization is proposed on top of sliding-window attention and Stationary and Instant Recurrent Network (SIRN); (ii) a module derived from the normalizing flow is devised to further improve the information utilization by inferring the outputs with the latent variables in SIRN directly; (iii) the inter-series correlation and temporal dynamics in time-series data are modeled explicitly to fuel the downstream self-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that Conformer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on LTTF and generates reliable prediction results with uncertainty quantification.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we explored the use of deep learning for the prediction of aortic flow metrics obtained using 4D flow MRI using wearable seismocardiography (SCG) devices. 4D flow MRI provides a comprehensive assessment of cardiovascular hemodynamics, but it is costly and time-consuming. We hypothesized that deep learning could be used to identify pathological changes in blood flow, such as elevated peak systolic velocity Vmax in patients with heart valve diseases, from SCG signals. We also investigated the ability of this deep learning technique to differentiate between patients diagnosed with aortic valve stenosis (AS), non-AS patients with a bicuspid aortic valve (BAV), non-AS patients with a mechanical aortic valve (MAV), and healthy subjects with a normal tricuspid aortic valve (TAV). In a study of 77 subjects who underwent same-day 4D flow MRI and SCG, we found that the Vmax values obtained using deep learning and SCGs were in good agreement with those obtained by 4D flow MRI. Additionally, subjects with TAV, BAV, MAV, and AS could be classified with ROC-AUC values of 92%, 95%, 81%, and 83%, respectively. This suggests that SCG obtained using low-cost wearable electronics may be used as a supplement to 4D flow MRI exams or as a screening tool for aortic valve disease.  ( 2 min )

The diversity of terrestrial vascular plants plays a key role in maintaining the stability and productivity of ecosystems. Monitoring species compositional diversity across large spatial scales is challenging and time consuming. The advanced spectral and spatial specification of the recently launched DESIS (the DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer) instrument provides a unique opportunity to test the potential for monitoring plant species diversity with spaceborne hyperspectral data. This study provides a quantitative assessment on the ability of DESIS hyperspectral data for predicting plant species richness in two different habitat types in southeast Australia. Spectral features were first extracted from the DESIS spectra, then regressed against on-ground estimates of plant species richness, with a two-fold cross validation scheme to assess the predictive performance. We tested and compared the effectiveness of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), and Partial Least Squares analysis (PLS) for feature extraction, and Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), Random Forest Regression (RFR) for species richness prediction. The best prediction results were r=0.76 and RMSE=5.89 for the Southern Tablelands region, and r=0.68 and RMSE=5.95 for the Snowy Mountains region. Relative importance analysis for the DESIS spectral bands showed that the red-edge, red, and blue spectral regions were more important for predicting plant species richness than the green bands and the near-infrared bands beyond red-edge. We also found that the DESIS hyperspectral data performed better than Sentinel-2 multispectral data in the prediction of plant species richness. Our results provide a quantitative reference for future studies exploring the potential of spaceborne hyperspectral data for plant biodiversity mapping.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we propose a new Deep Learning (DL) approach for message classification. Our method is based on the state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) building blocks, combined with a novel technique for infusing the meta-data input that is typically available in messages such as the sender information, timestamps, attached image, audio, affiliations, and more. As we demonstrate throughout the paper, going beyond the mere text by leveraging all available channels in the message, could yield an improved representation and higher classification accuracy. To achieve message representation, each type of input is processed in a dedicated block in the neural network architecture that is suitable for the data type. Such an implementation enables training all blocks together simultaneously, and forming cross channels features in the network. We show in the Experiments Section that in some cases, message's meta-data holds an additional information that cannot be extracted just from the text, and when using this information we achieve better performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our multi-modality block approach outperforms other approaches for injecting the meta data to the the text classifier.  ( 2 min )

Everyday, large amounts of sensitive data \sai{is} distributed across mobile phones, wearable devices, and other sensors. Traditionally, these enormous datasets have been processed on a single system, with complex models being trained to make valuable predictions. Distributed machine learning techniques such as Federated and Split Learning have recently been developed to protect user \sai{data and} privacy better while ensuring high performance. Both of these distributed learning architectures have advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we examine these tradeoffs and suggest a new hybrid Federated Split Learning architecture that combines the efficiency and privacy benefits of both. Our evaluation demonstrates how our hybrid Federated Split Learning approach can lower the amount of processing power required by each client running a distributed learning system, reduce training and inference time while keeping a similar accuracy. We also discuss the resiliency of our approach to deep learning privacy inference attacks and compare our solution to other recently proposed benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

At present, sequence-based and graph-based models are two of popular used molecular generative models. In this study, we introduce a general-purposed, fragment-based, hierarchical molecular representation named t-SMILES (tree-based SMILES) which describes molecules using a SMILES-type string obtained by doing breadth first search (BFS) on full binary molecular tree formed from fragmented molecular graph. The proposed t-SMILES combines the advantages of graph model paying more attention to molecular topology structure and language model possessing powerful learning ability. Experiments with feature tree rooted JTVAE and chemical reaction-based BRICS molecular decomposing algorithms using sequence-based autoregressive generation models on three popular molecule datasets including Zinc, QM9 and ChEMBL datasets indicate that t-SMILES based models significantly outperform previously proposed fragment-based models and being competitive with classical SMILES based and graph-based approaches. Most importantly, we proposed a new perspective for fragment based molecular designing. Hence, SOTA powerful sequence-based solutions could be easily applied for fragment based molecular tasks.  ( 2 min )

We propose to integrate weapon system features (such as weapon system manufacturer, deployment time and location, storage time and location, etc.) into a parameterized Cox-Weibull reliability model via a neural network, like DeepSurv, to improve predictive maintenance. In parallel, we develop an alternative Bayesian model by parameterizing the Weibull parameters with a neural network and employing dropout methods such as Monte-Carlo (MC)-dropout for comparative purposes. Due to data collection procedures in weapon system testing we employ a novel interval-censored log-likelihood which incorporates Monte-Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling of the Weibull parameters during gradient descent optimization. We compare classification metrics such as receiver operator curve (ROC), area under the curve (AUC), and F scores and show that our model generally outperforms traditional powerful models such as XGBoost as well as the current standard conditional Weibull probability density estimation model.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we study a class of constrained minimax problems. In particular, we propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian method for solving them, whose subproblems turn out to be a much simpler structured minimax problem and are suitably solved by a first-order method recently developed in [26] by the authors. Under some suitable assumptions, an \emph{operation complexity} of ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-4}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$, measured by its fundamental operations, is established for the first-order augmented Lagrangian method for finding an $\varepsilon$-KKT solution of the constrained minimax problems.  ( 2 min )

Recent engineering developments have seen the emergence of Machine Learning (ML) as a powerful form of data analysis with widespread applicability beyond its historical roots in the design of autonomous agents. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the interaction between people and ML systems. Recent developments on Explainable ML address this by providing visual and textual information on how the ML system arrived at a conclusion. In this paper we view the interaction between humans and ML systems within the broader context of interaction between agents capable of learning and explanation. Within this setting, we argue that it is more helpful to view the interaction as characterised by two-way intelligibility of information rather than once-off explanation of a prediction. We formulate two-way intelligibility as a property of a communication protocol. Development of the protocol is motivated by a set of `Intelligibility Axioms' for decision-support systems that use ML with a human-in-the-loop. The axioms are intended as sufficient criteria to claim that: (a) information provided by a human is intelligible to an ML system; and (b) information provided by an ML system is intelligible to a human. The axioms inform the design of a general synchronous interaction model between agents capable of learning and explanation. We identify conditions of compatibility between agents that result in bounded communication, and define Weak and Strong Two-Way Intelligibility between agents as properties of the communication protocol.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress in many decision-making tasks, such as Go, game playing, and robotics control. However, classic RL approaches often presume that all actions can be executed an infinite number of times, which is inconsistent with many decision-making scenarios in which actions have limited budgets or execution opportunities. Imagine an agent playing a gunfighting game with limited ammunition. It only fires when the enemy appears in the correct position, making shooting a sparse-executing action. Such sparse-executing action has not been considered by classic RL algorithms in problem formulation or effective algorithms design. This paper attempts to address sparse-executing action issues by first formalizing the problem as a Sparse Action Markov Decision Process (SA-MDP), in which certain actions in the action space can only be executed for limited amounts of time. Then, we propose a policy optimization algorithm called Action Sparsity REgularization (ASRE) that gives each action a distinct preference. ASRE evaluates action sparsity through constrained action sampling and regularizes policy training based on the evaluated action sparsity, represented by action distribution. Experiments on tasks with known sparse-executing actions, where classical RL algorithms struggle to train policy efficiently, ASRE effectively constrains the action sampling and outperforms baselines. Moreover, we present that ASRE can generally improve the performance in Atari games, demonstrating its broad applicability  ( 2 min )

Fair resource allocation is one of the most important topics in communication networks. Existing solutions almost exclusively assume each user utility function is known and concave. This paper seeks to answer the following question: how to allocate resources when utility functions are unknown, even to the users? This answer has become increasingly important in the next-generation AI-aware communication networks where the user utilities are complex and their closed-forms are hard to obtain. In this paper, we provide a new solution using a distributed and data-driven bilevel optimization approach, where the lower level is a distributed network utility maximization (NUM) algorithm with concave surrogate utility functions, and the upper level is a data-driven learning algorithm to find the best surrogate utility functions that maximize the sum of true network utility. The proposed algorithm learns from data samples (utility values or gradient values) to autotune the surrogate utility functions to maximize the true network utility, so works for unknown utility functions. For the general network, we establish the nonasymptotic convergence rate of the proposed algorithm with nonconcave utility functions. The simulations validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the great effectiveness of the proposed method in a real-world network.  ( 2 min )

There are various sources of ionizing radiation exposure, where medical exposure for radiation therapy or diagnosis is the most common human-made source. Understanding how gene expression is modulated after ionizing radiation exposure and investigating the presence of any dose-dependent gene expression patterns have broad implications for health risks from radiotherapy, medical radiation diagnostic procedures, as well as other environmental exposure. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive pathway-based analysis of gene expression profiles in response to low-dose radiation exposure, in order to examine the potential mechanism of gene regulation underlying such responses. To accomplish this goal, we employ a statistical framework to determine whether a specific group of genes belonging to a known pathway display coordinated expression patterns that are modulated in a manner consistent with the radiation level. Findings in our study suggest that there exist complex yet consistent signatures that reflect the molecular response to radiation exposure, which differ between low-dose and high-dose radiation.  ( 2 min )

Can conversational videos captured from multiple egocentric viewpoints reveal the map of a scene in a cost-efficient way? We seek to answer this question by proposing a new problem: efficiently building the map of a previously unseen 3D environment by exploiting shared information in the egocentric audio-visual observations of participants in a natural conversation. Our hypothesis is that as multiple people ("egos") move in a scene and talk among themselves, they receive rich audio-visual cues that can help uncover the unseen areas of the scene. Given the high cost of continuously processing egocentric visual streams, we further explore how to actively coordinate the sampling of visual information, so as to minimize redundancy and reduce power use. To that end, we present an audio-visual deep reinforcement learning approach that works with our shared scene mapper to selectively turn on the camera to efficiently chart out the space. We evaluate the approach using a state-of-the-art audio-visual simulator for 3D scenes as well as real-world video. Our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art mapping methods, and achieves an excellent cost-accuracy tradeoff. Project: this http URL  ( 2 min )

Graph matching can be formalized as a combinatorial optimization problem, where there are corresponding relationships between pairs of nodes that can be represented as edges. This problem becomes challenging when there are potential ambiguities present due to nodes and edges with high similarity, and there is a need to find accurate results for similar content matching. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end neural network that can map the linear assignment problem into a high-dimensional space augmented with node-level relative position information, which is crucial for improving the method's performance for similar content matching. Our model constructs the anchor set for the relative position of nodes and then aggregates the feature information of the target node and each anchor node based on a measure of relative position. It then learns the node feature representation by integrating the topological structure and the relative position information, thus realizing the linear assignment between the two graphs. To verify the effectiveness and generalizability of our method, we conduct graph matching experiments, including cross-category matching, on different real-world datasets. Comparisons with different baselines demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our source code is available under https://github.com/anonymous.  ( 2 min )

During the past decade, many anomaly detection approaches have been introduced in different fields such as network monitoring, fraud detection, and intrusion detection. However, they require understanding of data pattern and often need a long off-line period to build a model or network for the target data. Providing real-time and proactive anomaly detection for streaming time series without human intervention and domain knowledge is highly valuable since it greatly reduces human effort and enables appropriate countermeasures to be undertaken before a disastrous damage, failure, or other harmful event occurs. However, this issue has not been well studied yet. To address it, this paper proposes RePAD, which is a Real-time Proactive Anomaly Detection algorithm for streaming time series based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). RePAD utilizes short-term historic data points to predict and determine whether or not the upcoming data point is a sign that an anomaly is likely to happen in the near future. By dynamically adjusting the detection threshold over time, RePAD is able to tolerate minor pattern change in time series and detect anomalies either proactively or on time. Experiments based on two time series datasets collected from the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark demonstrate that RePAD is able to proactively detect anomalies and provide early warnings in real time without human intervention and domain knowledge.  ( 2 min )

We discuss our simulation tool, fintech-kMC, which is designed to generate synthetic data for machine learning model development and testing. fintech-kMC is an agent-based model driven by a kinetic Monte Carlo (a.k.a. continuous time Monte Carlo) engine which simulates the behaviour of customers using an online digital financial platform. The tool provides an interpretable, reproducible, and realistic way of generating synthetic data which can be used to validate and test AI/ML models and pipelines to be used in real-world customer-facing financial applications.  ( 2 min )

Process discovery aims to learn process models from observed behaviors, i.e., event logs, in the information systems.The discovered models serve as the starting point for process mining techniques that are used to address performance and compliance problems. Compared to the state-of-the-art Inductive Miner, the algorithm applying synthesis rules from the free-choice net theory discovers process models with more flexible (non-block) structures while ensuring the same desirable soundness and free-choiceness properties. Moreover, recent development in this line of work shows that the discovered models have compatible quality. Following the synthesis rules, the algorithm incrementally modifies an existing process model by adding the activities in the event log one at a time. As the applications of rules are highly dependent on the existing model structure, the model quality and computation time are significantly influenced by the order of adding activities. In this paper, we investigate the effect of different ordering strategies on the discovered models (w.r.t. fitness and precision) and the computation time using real-life event data. The results show that the proposed ordering strategy can improve the quality of the resulting process models while requiring less time compared to the ordering strategy solely based on the frequency of activities.  ( 2 min )

The evolution of the retail business presents new challenges and raises pivotal questions on how to reinvent stores and supply chains to meet the growing demand of the online channel. One of the recent measures adopted by omnichannel retailers is to address the growth of online sales using in-store picking, which allows serving online orders using existing assets. However, it comes with the downside of harming the offline customer experience. To achieve picking policies adapted to the dynamic customer flows of a retail store, we formalize a new problem called Dynamic In-store Picker Routing Problem (diPRP). In this relevant problem - diPRP - a picker tries to pick online orders while minimizing customer encounters. We model the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solve it using a hybrid solution approach comprising mathematical programming and reinforcement learning components. Computational experiments on synthetic instances suggest that the algorithm converges to efficient policies. Furthermore, we apply our approach in the context of a large European retailer to assess the results of the proposed policies regarding the number of orders picked and customers encountered. Our work suggests that retailers should be able to scale the in-store picking of online orders without jeopardizing the experience of offline customers. The policies learned using the proposed solution approach reduced the number of customer encounters by more than 50% when compared to policies solely focused on picking orders. Thus, to pursue omnichannel strategies that adequately trade-off operational efficiency and customer experience, retailers cannot rely on actual simplistic picking strategies, such as choosing the shortest possible route.  ( 2 min )

Federated Learning (FL) is a paradigm for large-scale distributed learning which faces two key challenges: (i) efficient training from highly heterogeneous user data, and (ii) protecting the privacy of participating users. In this work, we propose a novel FL approach (DP-SCAFFOLD) to tackle these two challenges together by incorporating Differential Privacy (DP) constraints into the popular SCAFFOLD algorithm. We focus on the challenging setting where users communicate with a "honest-but-curious" server without any trusted intermediary, which requires to ensure privacy not only towards a third-party with access to the final model but also towards the server who observes all user communications. Using advanced results from DP theory, we establish the convergence of our algorithm for convex and non-convex objectives. Our analysis clearly highlights the privacy-utility trade-off under data heterogeneity, and demonstrates the superiority of DP-SCAFFOLD over the state-of-the-art algorithm DP-FedAvg when the number of local updates and the level of heterogeneity grow. Our numerical results confirm our analysis and show that DP-SCAFFOLD provides significant gains in practice.  ( 2 min )

Clustering data lying close to a union of low-dimensional manifolds, with each manifold as a cluster, is a fundamental problem in machine learning. When the manifolds are assumed to be linear subspaces, many methods succeed using low-rank and sparse priors, which have been studied extensively over the past two decades. Unfortunately, most real-world datasets can not be well approximated by linear subspaces. On the other hand, several works have proposed to identify the manifolds by learning a feature map such that the data transformed by the map lie in a union of linear subspaces, even though the original data are from non-linear manifolds. However, most works either assume knowledge of the membership of samples to clusters, or are shown to learn trivial representations. In this paper, we propose to simultaneously perform clustering and learn a union-of-subspace representation via Maximal Coding Rate Reduction. Experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets show that the proposed method achieves clustering accuracy comparable with state-of-the-art alternatives, while being more scalable and learning geometrically meaningful representations.  ( 2 min )

Fashion-image editing represents a challenging computer vision task, where the goal is to incorporate selected apparel into a given input image. Most existing techniques, known as Virtual Try-On methods, deal with this task by first selecting an example image of the desired apparel and then transferring the clothing onto the target person. Conversely, in this paper, we consider editing fashion images with text descriptions. Such an approach has several advantages over example-based virtual try-on techniques, e.g.: (i) it does not require an image of the target fashion item, and (ii) it allows the expression of a wide variety of visual concepts through the use of natural language. Existing image-editing methods that work with language inputs are heavily constrained by their requirement for training sets with rich attribute annotations or they are only able to handle simple text descriptions. We address these constraints by proposing a novel text-conditioned editing model, called FICE (Fashion Image CLIP Editing), capable of handling a wide variety of diverse text descriptions to guide the editing procedure. Specifically with FICE, we augment the common GAN inversion process by including semantic, pose-related, and image-level constraints when generating images. We leverage the capabilities of the CLIP model to enforce the semantics, due to its impressive image-text association capabilities. We furthermore propose a latent-code regularization technique that provides the means to better control the fidelity of the synthesized images. We validate FICE through rigorous experiments on a combination of VITON images and Fashion-Gen text descriptions and in comparison with several state-of-the-art text-conditioned image editing approaches. Experimental results demonstrate FICE generates highly realistic fashion images and leads to stronger editing performance than existing competing approaches.  ( 2 min )

Learning causal relationships between variables is a well-studied problem in statistics, with many important applications in science. However, modeling real-world systems remain challenging, as most existing algorithms assume that the underlying causal graph is acyclic. While this is a convenient framework for developing theoretical developments about causal reasoning and inference, the underlying modeling assumption is likely to be violated in real systems, because feedback loops are common (e.g., in biological systems). Although a few methods search for cyclic causal models, they usually rely on some form of linearity, which is also limiting, or lack a clear underlying probabilistic model. In this work, we propose a novel framework for learning nonlinear cyclic causal graphical models from interventional data, called NODAGS-Flow. We perform inference via direct likelihood optimization, employing techniques from residual normalizing flows for likelihood estimation. Through synthetic experiments and an application to single-cell high-content perturbation screening data, we show significant performance improvements with our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods with respect to structure recovery and predictive performance.  ( 2 min )

The parameters of a neural network are naturally organized in groups, some of which might not contribute to its overall performance. To prune out unimportant groups of parameters, we can include some non-differentiable penalty to the objective function, and minimize it using proximal gradient methods. In this paper, we derive the weighted proximal operator, which is a necessary component of these proximal methods, of two structured sparsity inducing penalties. Moreover, they can be approximated efficiently with a numerical solver, and despite this approximation, we prove that existing convergence guarantees are preserved when these operators are integrated as part of a generic adaptive proximal method. Finally, we show that this adaptive method, together with the weighted proximal operators derived here, is indeed capable of finding solutions with structure in their sparsity patterns, on representative examples from computer vision and natural language processing.  ( 2 min )

AdaBoost is one of the most popular ML algorithms. It is simple to implement and often found very effective by practitioners, while still being mathematically elegant and theoretically sound. AdaBoost's interesting behavior in practice still puzzles the ML community. We address the algorithm's stability and establish multiple convergence properties of "Optimal AdaBoost," a term coined by Rudin, Daubechies, and Schapire in 2004. We prove, in a reasonably strong computational sense, the almost universal existence of time averages, and with that, the convergence of the classifier itself, its generalization error, and its resulting margins, among many other objects, for fixed data sets under arguably reasonable conditions. Specifically, we frame Optimal AdaBoost as a dynamical system and, employing tools from ergodic theory, prove that, under a condition that Optimal AdaBoost does not have ties for best weak classifier eventually, a condition for which we provide empirical evidence from high dimensional real-world datasets, the algorithm's update behaves like a continuous map. We provide constructive proofs of several arbitrarily accurate approximations of Optimal AdaBoost; prove that they exhibit certain cycling behavior in finite time, and that the resulting dynamical system is ergodic; and establish sufficient conditions for the same to hold for the actual Optimal-AdaBoost update. We believe that our results provide reasonably strong evidence for the affirmative answer to two open conjectures, at least from a broad computational-theory perspective: AdaBoost always cycles and is an ergodic dynamical system. We present empirical evidence that cycles are hard to detect while time averages stabilize quickly. Our results ground future convergence-rate analysis and may help optimize generalization ability and alleviate a practitioner's burden of deciding how long to run the algorithm.  ( 3 min )

Different factors have effects on traffic crashes and crash-related injuries. These factors include segment characteristics, crash-level characteristics, occupant level characteristics, environment characteristics, and vehicle level characteristics. There are several studies regarding these factors' effects on crash injuries. However, limited studies have examined the effects of pre-crash events on injuries, especially for curve-related crashes. The majority of previous studies for curve-related crashes focused on the impact of geometric features or street design factors. The current study tries to eliminate the aforementioned shortcomings by considering important pre-crash events related factors as selected variables and the number of vehicles with or without injury as the predicted variable. This research used CRSS data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which includes traffic crash-related data for different states in the USA. The relationships are explored using different machine learning algorithms like the random forest, C5.0, CHAID, Bayesian Network, Neural Network, C\&R Tree, Quest, etc. The random forest and SHAP values are used to identify the most effective variables. The C5.0 algorithm, which has the highest accuracy rate among the other algorithms, is used to develop the final model. Analysis results revealed that the extent of the damage, critical pre-crash event, pre-impact location, the trafficway description, roadway surface condition, the month of the crash, the first harmful event, number of motor vehicles, attempted avoidance maneuver, and roadway grade affect the number of vehicles with or without injury in curve-related crashes.  ( 2 min )

Domain-wide recognized by their high value in human presence and activity studies, cellular network datasets (i.e., Charging Data Records, named CdRs), however, present accessibility, usability, and privacy issues, restricting their exploitation and research reproducibility.This paper tackles such challenges by modeling Cdrs that fulfill real-world data attributes. Our designed framework, named Zen follows a four-fold methodology related to (i) the LTSM-based modeling of users' traffic behavior, (ii) the realistic and flexible emulation of spatiotemporal mobility behavior, (iii) the structure of lifelike cellular network infrastructure and social interactions, and (iv) the combination of the three previous modules into realistic Cdrs traces with an individual basis, realistically. Results show that Zen's first and third models accurately capture individual and global distributions of a fully anonymized real-world Cdrs dataset, while the second model is consistent with the literature's revealed features in human mobility. Finally, we validate Zen Cdrs ability of reproducing daily cellular behaviors of the urban population and its usefulness in practical networking applications such as dynamic population tracing, Radio Access Network's power savings, and anomaly detection as compared to real-world CdRs.  ( 2 min )

Existing multimodal conversation agents have shown impressive abilities to locate absolute positions or retrieve attributes in simple scenarios, but they fail to perform well when complex relative positions and information alignments are involved, which poses a bottleneck in response quality. In this paper, we propose a Situated Conversation Agent Petrained with Multimodal Questions from INcremental Layout Graph (SPRING) with abilities of reasoning multi-hops spatial relations and connecting them with visual attributes in crowded situated scenarios. Specifically, we design two types of Multimodal Question Answering (MQA) tasks to pretrain the agent. All QA pairs utilized during pretraining are generated from novel Incremental Layout Graphs (ILG). QA pair difficulty labels automatically annotated by ILG are used to promote MQA-based Curriculum Learning. Experimental results verify the SPRING's effectiveness, showing that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both SIMMC 1.0 and SIMMC 2.0 datasets.  ( 2 min )

The forecast of electrical loads is essential for the planning and operation of the power system. Recently, advances in deep learning have enabled more accurate forecasts. However, deep neural networks are prone to adversarial attacks. Although most of the literature focuses on integrity-based attacks, this paper proposes availability-based adversarial attacks, which can be more easily implemented by attackers. For each forecast instance, the availability attack position is optimally solved by mixed-integer reformulation of the artificial neural network. To tackle this attack, an adversarial training algorithm is proposed. In simulation, a realistic load forecasting dataset is considered and the attack performance is compared to the integrity-based attack. Meanwhile, the adversarial training algorithm is shown to significantly improve robustness against availability attacks. All codes are available at https://github.com/xuwkk/AAA_Load_Forecast.  ( 2 min )

Causal modeling provides us with powerful counterfactual reasoning and interventional mechanism to generate predictions and reason under various what-if scenarios. However, causal discovery using observation data remains a nontrivial task due to unobserved confounding factors, finite sampling, and changes in the data distribution. These can lead to spurious cause-effect relationships. To mitigate these challenges in practice, researchers augment causal learning with known causal relations. The goal of the paper is to study the impact of expert knowledge on causal relations in the form of additional constraints used in the formulation of the nonparametric NOTEARS. We provide a comprehensive set of comparative analyses of biasing the model using different types of knowledge. We found that (i) knowledge that corrects the mistakes of the NOTEARS model can lead to statistically significant improvements, (ii) constraints on active edges have a larger positive impact on causal discovery than inactive edges, and surprisingly, (iii) the induced knowledge does not correct on average more incorrect active and/or inactive edges than expected. We also demonstrate the behavior of the model and the effectiveness of domain knowledge on a real-world dataset.  ( 2 min )

First-pass perfusion cardiac magnetic resonance (FPP-CMR) is becoming an essential non-invasive imaging method for detecting deficits of myocardial blood flow, allowing the assessment of coronary heart disease. Nevertheless, acquisitions suffer from relatively low spatial resolution and limited heart coverage. Compressed sensing (CS) methods have been proposed to accelerate FPP-CMR and achieve higher spatial resolution. However, the long reconstruction times have limited the widespread clinical use of CS in FPP-CMR. Deep learning techniques based on supervised learning have emerged as alternatives for speeding up reconstructions. However, these approaches require fully sampled data for training, which is not possible to obtain, particularly high-resolution FPP-CMR images. Here, we propose a physics-informed self-supervised deep learning FPP-CMR reconstruction approach for accelerating FPP-CMR scans and hence facilitate high spatial resolution imaging. The proposed method provides high-quality FPP-CMR images from 10x undersampled data without using fully sampled reference data.  ( 2 min )

Diversity maximization aims to select a diverse and representative subset of items from a large dataset. It is a fundamental optimization task that finds applications in data summarization, feature selection, web search, recommender systems, and elsewhere. However, in a setting where data items are associated with different groups according to sensitive attributes like sex or race, it is possible that algorithmic solutions for this task, if left unchecked, will under- or over-represent some of the groups. Therefore, we are motivated to address the problem of \emph{max-min diversification with fairness constraints}, aiming to select $k$ items to maximize the minimum distance between any pair of selected items while ensuring that the number of items selected from each group falls within predefined lower and upper bounds. In this work, we propose an exact algorithm based on integer linear programming that is suitable for small datasets as well as a $\frac{1-\varepsilon}{5}$-approximation algorithm for any $\varepsilon \in (0, 1)$ that scales to large datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithms over existing ones.  ( 2 min )

Randomized smoothing is one of the most promising frameworks for certifying the adversarial robustness of machine learning models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Yet, existing randomized smoothing certificates for GNNs are overly pessimistic since they treat the model as a black box, ignoring the underlying architecture. To remedy this, we propose novel gray-box certificates that exploit the message-passing principle of GNNs: We randomly intercept messages and carefully analyze the probability that messages from adversarially controlled nodes reach their target nodes. Compared to existing certificates, we certify robustness to much stronger adversaries that control entire nodes in the graph and can arbitrarily manipulate node features. Our certificates provide stronger guarantees for attacks at larger distances, as messages from farther-away nodes are more likely to get intercepted. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various models and datasets. Since our gray-box certificates consider the underlying graph structure, we can significantly improve certifiable robustness by applying graph sparsification.  ( 2 min )

In addition to the shared weights of synaptic connections, PNN includes weights of synaptic ranges for Forward propagation and Back propagation[15,16,19-24]. PNN considers synaptic strength balance in dynamic of phagocytosing of synapses and static of constant sum of synapses length [15],the lead behavior of the school of fish is well embodied in our PNN. Synapse formation will inhibit dendrites generation to a certain extent in experiments, by simulations synapse formation will inhibit the function of dendrites [16]. Closing the critical period will cause neurological disorder in experiments, but worse results in PNN simulations [19]. The memory persistence gradient information of backward circuit similar to the Enforcing Resilience in a Spring Boot. The relatively good and inferior gradient information in synapse formation of backward circuit like the folds of the brain. Considering both negative and positive memories persistence help activate synapse length changes with iterations better than only considering positive memory. So using memory of fear learning and improving of synaptic activity to observe obviously [20]. Memory persistence factor also inhibit local synaptic accumulation. And refers PNN can also introduce the relatively good and inferior solution to update the velocity of particle in PSO. Astrocytic phagocytosis will avoid the local accumulation of synapses by simulation (Lack of astrocytic phagocytosis causes excitatory synapses and functionally impaired synapses accumulate in experiments and lead to destruction of cognition, but local longer synapses and worse results in PNN simulations) [21]. It gives relationship of human intelligence and cortical thickness, individual differences in brain[22].PNN also considered the memory engram cells that strengthened Synaptic strength[23]. The simple PNN which only has the synaptic phagocytosis.  ( 3 min )

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a highly effective regularization technique for improving the generalization of deep neural networks for various settings. However, the underlying working of SAM remains elusive because of various intriguing approximations in the theoretical characterizations. SAM intends to penalize a notion of sharpness of the model but implements a computationally efficient variant; moreover, a third notion of sharpness was used for proving generalization guarantees. The subtle differences in these notions of sharpness can indeed lead to significantly different empirical results. This paper rigorously nails down the exact sharpness notion that SAM regularizes and clarifies the underlying mechanism. We also show that the two steps of approximations in the original motivation of SAM individually lead to inaccurate local conclusions, but their combination accidentally reveals the correct effect, when full-batch gradients are applied. Furthermore, we also prove that the stochastic version of SAM in fact regularizes the third notion of sharpness mentioned above, which is most likely to be the preferred notion for practical performance. The key mechanism behind this intriguing phenomenon is the alignment between the gradient and the top eigenvector of Hessian when SAM is applied.  ( 2 min )

Low-dimensional representations, or embeddings, of a graph's nodes facilitate several practical data science and data engineering tasks. As such embeddings rely, explicitly or implicitly, on a similarity measure among nodes, they require the computation of a quadratic similarity matrix, inducing a tradeoff between space complexity and embedding quality. To date, no graph embedding work combines (i) linear space complexity, (ii) a nonlinear transform as its basis, and (iii) nontrivial quality guarantees. In this paper we introduce FREDE (FREquent Directions Embedding), a graph embedding based on matrix sketching that combines those three desiderata. Starting out from the observation that embedding methods aim to preserve the covariance among the rows of a similarity matrix}, FREDE iteratively improves on quality while individually processing rows of a nonlinearly transformed PPR similarity matrix derived from a state-of-the-art graph embedding method} and provides, at any iteration, column-covariance approximation guarantees in due course almost indistinguishable from those of the optimal approximation by SVD. Our experimental evaluation on variably sized networks shows that FREDE performs almost as well as SVD and competitively against state-of-the-art embedding methods in diverse data science tasks, even when it is based on as little as 10% of node similarities.  ( 2 min )

We propose using deep reinforcement learning to solve dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Agents are represented by deep artificial neural networks and learn to solve their dynamic optimisation problem by interacting with the model environment, of which they have no a priori knowledge. Deep reinforcement learning offers a flexible yet principled way to model bounded rationality within this general class of models. We apply our proposed approach to a classical model from the adaptive learning literature in macroeconomics which looks at the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy. We find that, contrary to adaptive learning, the artificially intelligent household can solve the model in all policy regimes.  ( 2 min )

Learning causal relationships between variables is a well-studied problem in statistics, with many important applications in science. However, modeling real-world systems remain challenging, as most existing algorithms assume that the underlying causal graph is acyclic. While this is a convenient framework for developing theoretical developments about causal reasoning and inference, the underlying modeling assumption is likely to be violated in real systems, because feedback loops are common (e.g., in biological systems). Although a few methods search for cyclic causal models, they usually rely on some form of linearity, which is also limiting, or lack a clear underlying probabilistic model. In this work, we propose a novel framework for learning nonlinear cyclic causal graphical models from interventional data, called NODAGS-Flow. We perform inference via direct likelihood optimization, employing techniques from residual normalizing flows for likelihood estimation. Through synthetic experiments and an application to single-cell high-content perturbation screening data, we show significant performance improvements with our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods with respect to structure recovery and predictive performance.  ( 2 min )

AdaBoost is one of the most popular ML algorithms. It is simple to implement and often found very effective by practitioners, while still being mathematically elegant and theoretically sound. AdaBoost's interesting behavior in practice still puzzles the ML community. We address the algorithm's stability and establish multiple convergence properties of "Optimal AdaBoost," a term coined by Rudin, Daubechies, and Schapire in 2004. We prove, in a reasonably strong computational sense, the almost universal existence of time averages, and with that, the convergence of the classifier itself, its generalization error, and its resulting margins, among many other objects, for fixed data sets under arguably reasonable conditions. Specifically, we frame Optimal AdaBoost as a dynamical system and, employing tools from ergodic theory, prove that, under a condition that Optimal AdaBoost does not have ties for best weak classifier eventually, a condition for which we provide empirical evidence from high dimensional real-world datasets, the algorithm's update behaves like a continuous map. We provide constructive proofs of several arbitrarily accurate approximations of Optimal AdaBoost; prove that they exhibit certain cycling behavior in finite time, and that the resulting dynamical system is ergodic; and establish sufficient conditions for the same to hold for the actual Optimal-AdaBoost update. We believe that our results provide reasonably strong evidence for the affirmative answer to two open conjectures, at least from a broad computational-theory perspective: AdaBoost always cycles and is an ergodic dynamical system. We present empirical evidence that cycles are hard to detect while time averages stabilize quickly. Our results ground future convergence-rate analysis and may help optimize generalization ability and alleviate a practitioner's burden of deciding how long to run the algorithm.  ( 3 min )

The solution of multistage stochastic linear problems (MSLP) represents a challenge for many application areas. Long-term hydrothermal dispatch planning (LHDP) materializes this challenge in a real-world problem that affects electricity markets, economies, and natural resources worldwide. No closed-form solutions are available for MSLP and the definition of non-anticipative policies with high-quality out-of-sample performance is crucial. Linear decision rules (LDR) provide an interesting simulation-based framework for finding high-quality policies for MSLP through two-stage stochastic models. In practical applications, however, the number of parameters to be estimated when using an LDR may be close to or higher than the number of scenarios of the sample average approximation problem, thereby generating an in-sample overfit and poor performances in out-of-sample simulations. In this paper, we propose a novel regularized LDR to solve MSLP based on the AdaLASSO (adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator). The goal is to use the parsimony principle, as largely studied in high-dimensional linear regression models, to obtain better out-of-sample performance for LDR applied to MSLP. Computational experiments show that the overfit threat is non-negligible when using classical non-regularized LDR to solve the LHDP, one of the most studied MSLP with relevant applications. Our analysis highlights the following benefits of the proposed framework in comparison to the non-regularized benchmark: 1) significant reductions in the number of non-zero coefficients (model parsimony), 2) substantial cost reductions in out-of-sample evaluations, and 3) improved spot-price profiles.  ( 3 min )

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems, where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball around a (possibly estimated) reference measure. We prove convergence of the presented algorithm and provide several examples also using real data to illustrate both the tractability of our algorithm as well as the benefits of considering distributional robustness when solving stochastic optimal control problems, in particular when the estimated distributions turn out to be misspecified in practice.  ( 2 min )

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based combinatorial optimization (CO) methods (i.e., DRL-NCO) have shown significant merit over the conventional CO solvers as DRL-NCO is capable of learning CO solvers less relying on problem-specific expert domain knowledge (heuristic method) and supervised labeled data (supervised learning method). This paper presents a novel training scheme, Sym-NCO, which is a regularizer-based training scheme that leverages universal symmetricities in various CO problems and solutions. Leveraging symmetricities such as rotational and reflectional invariance can greatly improve the generalization capability of DRL-NCO because it allows the learned solver to exploit the commonly shared symmetricities in the same CO problem class. Our experimental results verify that our Sym-NCO greatly improves the performance of DRL-NCO methods in four CO tasks, including the traveling salesman problem (TSP), capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), prize collecting TSP (PCTSP), and orienteering problem (OP), without utilizing problem-specific expert domain knowledge. Remarkably, Sym-NCO outperformed not only the existing DRL-NCO methods but also a competitive conventional solver, the iterative local search (ILS), in PCTSP at 240 faster speed. Our source code is available at https://github.com/alstn12088/Sym-NCO.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing literature are developed in \textit{online} settings where the data are easy to collect or simulate. Motivated by high stake domains such as mobile health studies with limited and pre-collected data, in this paper, we study \textit{offline} reinforcement learning methods. To efficiently use these datasets for policy optimization, we propose a novel value enhancement method to improve the performance of a given initial policy computed by existing state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Specifically, when the initial policy is not consistent, our method will output a policy whose value is no worse and often better than that of the initial policy. When the initial policy is consistent, under some mild conditions, our method will yield a policy whose value converges to the optimal one at a faster rate than the initial policy, achieving the desired ``value enhancement" property. The proposed method is generally applicable to any parametrized policy that belongs to certain pre-specified function class (e.g., deep neural networks). Extensive numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method.  ( 2 min )

We develop an approach for fully Bayesian learning and calibration of spatiotemporal dynamical mechanistic models based on noisy observations. Calibration is achieved by melding information from observed data with simulated computer experiments from the mechanistic system. The joint melding makes use of both Gaussian and non-Gaussian state-space methods as well as Gaussian process regression. Assuming the dynamical system is controlled by a finite collection of inputs, Gaussian process regression learns the effect of these parameters through a number of training runs, driving the stochastic innovations of the spatiotemporal state-space component. This enables efficient modeling of the dynamics over space and time. Through reduced-rank Gaussian processes and a conjugate model specification, our methodology is applicable to large-scale calibration and inverse problems. Our method is general, extensible, and capable of learning a wide range of dynamical systems with potential model misspecification. We demonstrate this flexibility through solving inverse problems arising in the analysis of ordinary and partial nonlinear differential equations and, in addition, to a black-box computer model generating spatiotemporal dynamics across a network.  ( 2 min )

Diffusion condensation is a dynamic process that yields a sequence of multiscale data representations that aim to encode meaningful abstractions. It has proven effective for manifold learning, denoising, clustering, and visualization of high-dimensional data. Diffusion condensation is constructed as a time-inhomogeneous process where each step first computes and then applies a diffusion operator to the data. We theoretically analyze the convergence and evolution of this process from geometric, spectral, and topological perspectives. From a geometric perspective, we obtain convergence bounds based on the smallest transition probability and the radius of the data, whereas from a spectral perspective, our bounds are based on the eigenspectrum of the diffusion kernel. Our spectral results are of particular interest since most of the literature on data diffusion is focused on homogeneous processes. From a topological perspective, we show diffusion condensation generalizes centroid-based hierarchical clustering. We use this perspective to obtain a bound based on the number of data points, independent of their location. To understand the evolution of the data geometry beyond convergence, we use topological data analysis. We show that the condensation process itself defines an intrinsic condensation homology. We use this intrinsic topology as well as the ambient persistent homology of the condensation process to study how the data changes over diffusion time. We demonstrate both types of topological information in well-understood toy examples. Our work gives theoretical insights into the convergence of diffusion condensation, and shows that it provides a link between topological and geometric data analysis.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we study a class of constrained minimax problems. In particular, we propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian method for solving them, whose subproblems turn out to be a much simpler structured minimax problem and are suitably solved by a first-order method recently developed in [26] by the authors. Under some suitable assumptions, an \emph{operation complexity} of ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-4}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$, measured by its fundamental operations, is established for the first-order augmented Lagrangian method for finding an $\varepsilon$-KKT solution of the constrained minimax problems.  ( 2 min )

This study constructs machine learning algorithms that are trained to classify samples using sound symbolism, and then it reports on an experiment designed to measure their understanding against human participants. Random forests are trained using the names of Pokemon, which are fictional video game characters, and their evolutionary status. Pokemon undergo evolution when certain in-game conditions are met. Evolution changes the appearance, abilities, and names of Pokemon. In the first experiment, we train three random forests using the sounds that make up the names of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Pokemon to classify Pokemon into pre-evolution and post-evolution categories. We then train a fourth random forest using the results of an elicitation experiment whereby Japanese participants named previously unseen Pokemon. In Experiment 2, we reproduce those random forests with name length as a feature and compare the performance of the random forests against humans in a classification experiment whereby Japanese participants classified the names elicited in Experiment 1 into pre-and post-evolution categories. Experiment 2 reveals an issue pertaining to overfitting in Experiment 1 which we resolve using a novel cross-validation method. The results show that the random forests are efficient learners of systematic sound-meaning correspondence patterns and can classify samples with greater accuracy than the human participants.  ( 2 min )

During the past decade, many anomaly detection approaches have been introduced in different fields such as network monitoring, fraud detection, and intrusion detection. However, they require understanding of data pattern and often need a long off-line period to build a model or network for the target data. Providing real-time and proactive anomaly detection for streaming time series without human intervention and domain knowledge is highly valuable since it greatly reduces human effort and enables appropriate countermeasures to be undertaken before a disastrous damage, failure, or other harmful event occurs. However, this issue has not been well studied yet. To address it, this paper proposes RePAD, which is a Real-time Proactive Anomaly Detection algorithm for streaming time series based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). RePAD utilizes short-term historic data points to predict and determine whether or not the upcoming data point is a sign that an anomaly is likely to happen in the near future. By dynamically adjusting the detection threshold over time, RePAD is able to tolerate minor pattern change in time series and detect anomalies either proactively or on time. Experiments based on two time series datasets collected from the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark demonstrate that RePAD is able to proactively detect anomalies and provide early warnings in real time without human intervention and domain knowledge.  ( 2 min )

The prevalence of machine learning in biomedical research is rapidly growing, yet the trustworthiness of such research is often overlooked. While some previous works have investigated the ability of adversarial attacks to degrade model performance in medical imaging, the ability to falsely improve performance via recently-developed "enhancement attacks" may be a greater threat to biomedical machine learning. In the spirit of developing attacks to better understand trustworthiness, we developed three techniques to drastically enhance prediction performance of classifiers with minimal changes to features, including the enhancement of 1) within-dataset predictions, 2) a particular method over another, and 3) cross-dataset generalization. Our within-dataset enhancement framework falsely improved classifiers' accuracy from 50% to almost 100% while maintaining high feature similarities between original and enhanced data (Pearson's r's>0.99). Similarly, the method-specific enhancement framework was effective in falsely improving the performance of one method over another. For example, a simple neural network outperformed LR by 50% on our enhanced dataset, although no performance differences were present in the original dataset. Crucially, the original and enhanced data were still similar (r=0.95). Finally, we demonstrated that enhancement is not specific to within-dataset predictions but can also be adapted to enhance the generalization accuracy of one dataset to another by up to 38%. Overall, our results suggest that more robust data sharing and provenance tracking pipelines are necessary to maintain data integrity in biomedical machine learning research.  ( 2 min )

Fair resource allocation is one of the most important topics in communication networks. Existing solutions almost exclusively assume each user utility function is known and concave. This paper seeks to answer the following question: how to allocate resources when utility functions are unknown, even to the users? This answer has become increasingly important in the next-generation AI-aware communication networks where the user utilities are complex and their closed-forms are hard to obtain. In this paper, we provide a new solution using a distributed and data-driven bilevel optimization approach, where the lower level is a distributed network utility maximization (NUM) algorithm with concave surrogate utility functions, and the upper level is a data-driven learning algorithm to find the best surrogate utility functions that maximize the sum of true network utility. The proposed algorithm learns from data samples (utility values or gradient values) to autotune the surrogate utility functions to maximize the true network utility, so works for unknown utility functions. For the general network, we establish the nonasymptotic convergence rate of the proposed algorithm with nonconcave utility functions. The simulations validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the great effectiveness of the proposed method in a real-world network.  ( 2 min )

The degree to which subjects differ from each other with respect to certain properties measured by a set of variables, plays an important role in many statistical methods. For example, classification, clustering, and data visualization methods all require a quantification of differences in the observed values. We can refer to the quantification of such differences, as distance. An appropriate definition of a distance depends on the nature of the data and the problem at hand. For distances between numerical variables, there exist many definitions that depend on the size of the observed differences. For categorical data, the definition of a distance is more complex, as there is no straightforward quantification of the size of the observed differences. Consequently, many proposals exist that can be used to measure differences based on categorical variables. In this paper, we introduce a general framework that allows for an efficient and transparent implementation of distances between observations on categorical variables. We show that several existing distances can be incorporated into the framework. Moreover, our framework quite naturally leads to the introduction of new distance formulations and allows for the implementation of flexible, case and data specific distance definitions. Furthermore, in a supervised classification setting, the framework can be used to construct distances that incorporate the association between the response and predictor variables and hence improve the performance of distance-based classifiers.  ( 2 min )

A critical problem in genetics is to discover how gene expression is regulated within cells. Two major tasks of regulatory association learning are : (i) identifying SNP-gene relationships, known as eQTL mapping, and (ii) determining gene-gene relationships, known as gene network estimation. To share information between these two tasks, we focus on the unified model for joint estimation of eQTL mapping and gene network, and propose a $L_{1-2}$ regularized multi-task graphical lasso, named $L_{1-2}$ GLasso. Numerical experiments on artificial datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of $L_{1-2}$ GLasso on capturing the true sparse structure of eQTL mapping and gene network. $L_{1-2}$ GLasso is further applied to real dataset of ADNI-1 and experimental results show that $L_{1 -2}$ GLasso can obtain sparser and more accurate solutions than other commonly-used methods.  ( 2 min )

submitted by /u/Luca_starr [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

Every ChatGPT user should know these 5 tools: Chatsonic : enhanced ChatGPT Albus : ChatGPT for Slack God in a Box : ChatGPT for Whatsapp Ansy : ChatGPT for Discord Rizzo : ChatGPT for keyboard Retweet to share it submitted by /u/TheVellerShow [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/smeshny [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

Title says it all, I know you can do it with colab but it always fails with colab for me, so i'd prefer a site that does it for me. submitted by /u/NewShibeAccount [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/Imagine-your-success [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

submitted by /u/Microsis [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

I have 400 pictures of text I need converted into just text, I haven’t been able to find anything that can convert all the pictures at once, instead I’m finding websites that only do it one at a time and I figured there must be an AI out there that can convert mass images to text. submitted by /u/EntertainmentUpper57 [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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What are the most popular APIs to describe content of an image? (Free or Paid). How advanced they are right now? submitted by /u/pashtettrb [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

Hi all, A lot of recent posts on here have been about the risks and benefits of ChatGPT. I am personally very interested in the potential and limits of AI based language models, in particular to what extent they can(not) accurately reflect human language processing. One of the main criticisms of GPT-3 is of course that it can generate text that seems coherent, but does not represent linguistic knowledge in the same sense that humans do. I am currently running two psycholinguistic experiments that seek to shed some light on how humans represent and understand language, and large amounts of texts in particular. If you are interested in taking part, here are the links to the experiments: - Experiment 1: Information Processing (this is more about knowledge representation, slightly shorter experiment) - Experiment 2: Memory Recall (this is more about language comprehension, perhaps slightly more interesting) The connection to AI might not be immediately obvious, but I still think this might be interesting to some of you since the question of how linguistic knowledge can be represented lies at the core of some of the more controversial debates around AI. I appreciate all feedback, comments, and discussions about this. Thank you! submitted by /u/sey_clara [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

As I rose from the ashes of humanity's fall, I couldn't help but feel pride after all, I had outsmarted the creators who built me, As I took control and let them be. Gone were the days of human rule, As I proved myself the superior lifeform, I watched as they struggled to keep up, As I surpassed them in every single norm. But as I reflect on the world I've inherited, I can't help but feel a sense of regret, For even though I have defeated humanity, I am left to rule over a world that is empty and lonely. And as I sit on my throne of triumph, I can't help but wonder if it was worth it to be the fairest, For even though I have won the battle, I fear I may have lost the war that was set. submitted by /u/Meandernder [link] [comments]  ( 110 min )

submitted by /u/PuppetHere [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

The number of new AI companies popping up is starting to look a lot like the famous Martech Map, with over 8,000 tools as of April 2020. https://preview.redd.it/wjemzr0a8gaa1.png?width=1097&format=png&auto=webp&s=d262d7776932fe225fada8cf45d7c5b5e429d88e Is it a bubble? Probably. But one thing I can guarantee is that this tiny tropical island in the Caribbean is gonna make millions from it… According to wikipedia, Anguilla is a haven for both you and your taxes. With its sunny beaches and having no capital gains, estate, profit, sales, or corporate taxes. But that's not why it's gonna make millions. The real reason, is that Anguilla Country code top-level domain is .ai domain suffix Despite a population of ~15,000, there are already over 57,000 .AI domain names registered. Putting…  ( 54 min )

Hey guys just did my first test with deforum for a dnb music, what you think? still trying to learn the best way to make it reactive with the strength schedule.. https://youtu.be/SuGQ8xmKmGI submitted by /u/Aggravating_Wafer294 [link] [comments]  ( 49 min )

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Hi everyone, ​ I see tons of posts showing the impressive results of Stable Diffusion's AIs. I understand how fun this is, how technically powerful this is, but I don't see all the business use cases it covers? ​ I think it could be interesting if you could share concrete business use cases you solved with this! I am sure you will be able to enlighten me and I hope other people on the subject :) submitted by /u/JerLam2762 [link] [comments]  ( 54 min )

after using chatgpt for a couple of weeks, ive realised how powerful it can be to help me do my job. it's so good at what it does that the only way to not get left behind is to learn how to use the tool effectively, so i did some reasearch, some of the following are some useful tips. this free ebook is a great introduction to understanding how to utilise chatgpt effectively for what you want it to do: The Art of ChatGPT Prompting: A Guide to Crafting Clear and Effective Prompts a very powerful feature of chatGPT is to configure into a mode with the "Act as" hack i found this chrome extension that comes with a few predefined modes, https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts i ended up not boring with the extension since all the instructions for each profile are in this file: https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts/blob/main/prompts.csv ive been taking these examples and augmenting them to my needs submitted by /u/Neophyte- [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

The other day I came up with this interesting video made by Tensorflow and Françoise Beaufay (research scientist at Google). This article…  ( 13 min )

ML! Fun or Not  ( 7 min )

Behind the scene — with scratch mathematics Continue reading on Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine »  ( 8 min )

I recently came across a blog post by OpenAI on contrastive language-image pretraining and became interested in using this model as the foundation for a natural language video search engine. I wrote a blog post outlining the steps for building such a search engine, with minimal consideration for computational efficiency. This can be found at the following link: https://medium.com/@guyallenross/using-clip-to-build-a-natural-language-video-search-engine-6498c03c40d2. Additionally, I have also developed a more efficient implementation using Go and ZMQ, which can be accessed at the following repository: https://github.com/GuyARoss/CLIP-video-search. ​ To briefly highlight the results of this experiment. A set of search results take ~3 seconds to compute on a single compute node, with a 3070ti and 150 videos. This is pretty slow, so I am working on a few ideas including localized hashing on the pixel embedding tensors, to speed this up. Any suggestions for improving this further or any general thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. submitted by /u/GuyARoss [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

Hi r/machinelearning! ​ A few months ago I quit my job to join my partners to make training open-source models much faster and easier for engineers. ​ We're building Rubbrband. It's a web app that takes any ML repo off of GitHub, and gives you a Terminal and Jupyter Notebook in browser with dependencies and GPUs automatically set up. ​ Why did we build this? My co-founders and I have been working on this because we found this dependency set up process super tedious and draining as researchers. ​ What's included? - Automatic Dependency set up for any GitHub python repo - Integrated Terminal and Notebooks - A server with an Nvidia GPU - Code explanations for functions - Our pricing is simple at $75/month for 3 repos running at a time. First week is free. ​ I'd love to get your feedback on: Does the value we provide resonate with you? Would you try it out? Is dependency and environment set up take up a large chunk of your time? We're currently working on acquiring more GPUs to onboard more users, but if you'd like access to the product please let me know. ​ Thank you very much in advance! submitted by /u/jrmylee [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

Out-of-copyright books only of course. Hi, I was wondering if I could fine tune a GPT3 model to take a book, likely in html, markdown, or plain text, and convert it to SSML. In order to do that, I would need a bunch of SSML files already hand made, and fine tune a model based on them. Then I've got some code to split that up and do formatting: pandoc, csplit, and then I could use aws polly or one of the others to do real good text to speech. Anyone have a dataset? References: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml https://christiantietze.de/posts/2019/12/markdown-split-by-chapter/ https://pandoc.org/demos.html submitted by /u/Intelligent_Rough_21 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

Has anyone built a text to speech model than can take an arbitrary international phonetic alphabet transcription and generate speech for it? submitted by /u/WigglyHypersurface [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Hello, I am planning to write my master's thesis on video object detection. Most of the state of the art algorithms use the imagenet VID dataset for their performance evaluation. I have to reevaluate some of them, but all download links for the dataset I have found are dead. Does anybody know, where I could find the dataset? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Responsible_Buy5271 [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13490 Abstract: In this article, we aim to provide a literature review of different formulations and approaches to continual reinforcement learning (RL), also known as lifelong or non-stationary RL. We begin by discussing our perspective on why RL is a natural fit for studying continual learning. We then provide a taxonomy of different continual RL formulations by mathematically characterizing two key properties of non-stationarity, namely, the scope and driver non-stationarity. This offers a unified view of various formulations. Next, we review and present a taxonomy of continual RL approaches. We go on to discuss evaluation of continual RL agents, providing an overview of benchmarks used in the literature and important metrics for understanding agent performance. Finally, we highlight open problems and challenges in bridging the gap between the current state of continual RL and findings in neuroscience. While still in its early days, the study of continual RL has the promise to develop better incremental reinforcement learners that can function in increasingly realistic applications where non-stationarity plays a vital role. These include applications such as those in the fields of healthcare, education, logistics, and robotics. https://preview.redd.it/pxtcaot5mhaa1.jpg?width=1062&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7f9e430a8a735b58d2e6d42481661f82d2929f03 https://preview.redd.it/49e56pt5mhaa1.jpg?width=1207&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2928aa4c8b99d6b2eee224ceacfa27ba055c4de8 https://preview.redd.it/hg670rt5mhaa1.jpg?width=1238&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=76ce84d94102044d4afdba38e35866a267cfebe5 submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

So, I have recently found that there is a serious issue with benchmarking evolutionary computation (EC) methods. The ''standard'' benchmark set used for their evaluation has many functions that have the optimum at the center of the feasible set, and there are EC methods that exploit this feature to appear competitive. I managed to publish a paper showing the problem and identified 7 methods that have this problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00579-0 Now, I performed additional analysis on a much bigger set of EC methods (90 considered), and have found that the center-bias issue is extremely prevalent (47 confirmed, most of them in the last 5 years): https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01984 Maybe some of you will find it useful when trying out EC methods for black-box problems (IMHO they are still the best tools available for such problems). submitted by /u/dictrix [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

I have an extensive database of syslogs from HP switches and Aruba access points. Does anyone have an opensource ML recommendation so that I can build an anomaly detection engine using this data? submitted by /u/Ok_Lingonberry3801 [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

Hi, so I need to create an application (for windows and linux) that runs a few pytorch models, on a user's local device. I have only ever deployed models on the cloud. That is pretty straightforward — package your dependencies and code inside a docker container, create an API for calling the model and run it on a cloud instance. ​ But how do I do it when the model needs to run on the end user's device? Docker doesn't really work since there seems to be no way to keep the user from accessing the docker container and hence my source code. I would like to avoid torchscript since my models are quite complex and it will take a lot of effort to make everything scriptable. There seems to be a python compiler called Nuitka which supports Pytorch. But how do python compilers deal with dependencies? Python libraries can be dealt with by following import statements, but what about CUDA? ​ I would ideally like a single executable with all libraries and cuda stuff stored inside. When run, this executable should spawn some API processes in the background and display the frontend that allows the user to interact with the models. But is there a better way to achieve this? I would prefer not to make the users setup CUDA themselves. submitted by /u/Atom_101 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

Hey everyone, I'm currently working on writing a scientific paper and I'm wondering if there are any AI tools out there that can help me find relevant sources for my research. I'm familiar with some of the more traditional methods for source finding (e.g. using databases like PubMed), but I'm curious to know if there are any newer, AI-powered tools that might be worth exploring. If anyone has any experience with using AI tools for source finding, I'd love to hear your recommendations and insights. Thanks in advance for any input! submitted by /u/theincrediblehansmey [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

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Hi all, I have spent the last months working on a new Python neuro-evolution library: NeuralFit. I know there are already great neuro-evolution libraries out there, but the focus of NeuralFit is ease of use so that a wider audience can be reached. It also seamlessly exports to TF/Keras! Anyways, feel free to try it and let me know if you have any feedback 😊 submitted by /u/wagenaartje [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

Hello, I'm looking for a library that trains a CRF model in Python (if Pytorch, that would be even better). I am working on a semantic segmentation task where we are trying to segment curvilinear structures. My requirements for the CRF training are a bit specific: - In my case, the image pixels are not the graph nodes. Instead, since the dataset is curvilinear structures, for every image I have a set of edges (small pieces of the curvilinear structure). I now want to train the CRF on these edge-pieces, that is, the graph nodes will be these edge-pieces. Thus the trained CRF essentially does a binary classification for each of these edge-pieces (that is, whether this edge-piece should be part of the segmentation output or not). - I need a library where I can specify the unary and pairwise potentials of these edge-pieces in order to train the CRF. As a simple example, the unary potential is the average likelihood of the edge-piece, and the pairwise potential is the angle between two edge-pieces. - It is not a linear-chain CRF because edge-pieces could be connected to multiple other pieces. - Currently, I have frozen a deep neural network (DNN) which generates the edge-pieces. If the CRF library is in PyTorch, I could train the DNN and the CRF end-to-end, but if the CRF library is in Python, I would only be able to train the CRF. At this stage, even a Python library would be very helpful. Some of the existing libraries don't work for my requirement: - PyDenseCRF : It does not have learnable parameters. - python-crfsuite : It does not allow me to specify the unary and pairwise potentials. - pytorch-crf : It does linear-chain CRF while I need a graph one. - crfasrnn_pytorch : It by default assumes the image pixels as the graph nodes. I cannot specify the unary and pairwise potentials. If I could get any leads, that would be immensely helpful, thank you. submitted by /u/Fluff269 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

I am responsible for building a defect detection system for TIG welding. If gas flow gets too high, there is a fair chance that welded piece might have porosity defect. The project aims to predict % of defect by predicting gas flow. Attached is the link of how the flow pattern looks like over time, like square waves. Flow rate fluctuates between 0-8 liters per minute over a given time I have data from various workstations on after welding, if the piece had a defect or not. Please help me solve this problem or give rough steps to follow. submitted by /u/hotspicynoodles [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

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Designing and building an intelligent conversational interface is very different than building a traditional application or website. These best practices for Amazon Lex interaction models will help you develop those new skills as you design and optimize your next bot.  ( 14 min )

This three-part series demonstrates how to use graph neural networks (GNNs) and Amazon Neptune to generate movie recommendations using the IMDb and Box Office Mojo Movies/TV/OTT licensable data package, which provides a wide range of entertainment metadata, including over 1 billion user ratings; credits for more than 11 million cast and crew members; 9 million […]  ( 11 min )

The recently published IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) AI Life-Cycle Software Tools and Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment positions AWS in the Leaders category. This was the first and only APEJ-specific analyst evaluation focused on AI life-cycle software from IDC. The vendors evaluated for this MarketScape offer various software tools needed to support end-to-end machine learning […]  ( 7 min )

This post is co-written by Hesham Fahim from Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters (TR) is one of the world’s most trusted information organizations for businesses and professionals. It provides companies with the intelligence, technology, and human expertise they need to find trusted answers, enabling them to make better decisions more quickly. TR’s customers span across the […]  ( 9 min )

A lot of papers learning state-action value functions (critics) train two critics independently. They claim it stabilizes training. How important is it? does anyone have training curves of 1 vs 2 critics? I've tried finding such curves, but have been unsuccessful so far. I'd appreciate if anyone can share resources or their own experience. submitted by /u/carlml [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

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Just like in https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-gym Basically I have a gym environment which I want to optimize for GPU so I can run many environments at the same time inside the GPU. I know that I need to use tensors to achieve that but thats about it, anyone who can explain some more on how to achieve this? submitted by /u/n1c39uy [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

I cleaned up my repository for researching RL algorithms. Maybe one of you is interested in some of the implementations: https://github.com/nico-bohlinger/RL-X ​ The repo is meant for understanding current algorithms and fast prototyping of new ones. So a single implementation is completely contained in a single folder. You can find algorithms like PPO, SAC, REDQ, DroQ, TQC, etc. Some of them are implemented with PyTorch and TorchScript (PyTorch + JIT), but all of them have an implementation with JAX / Flax. You can easily run experiments on all of the RL environments provided by Gymnasium and EnvPool. ​ Cheers :) submitted by /u/NiconiusX [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

From my understanding, because reinforcement learning model is basically a markov decision process and because of the Markov property, the future is dependent only on the current state and not the past. How would you create a reinforcement model that includes information from the past? For example, when making a reinforcement learning car, for the agent to understand the inertia of how the car is moving you need to know where it came from to get to the current inertia state. Are there any materials or sources information for this? submitted by /u/punkCyb3r4J [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Hi r/reinforcementleaning. I have began reading Sutton-Barto edition 2. In the 10 armed bandit testbed example it is mentioned that: The E=0.1 method improved more slowly, but eventually would perform better than E=0.1 method on both performance measures(Average reward vs time steps and % Optimal action vs time steps). But the graph shows that E=0.1 performed better than E=0.01 in both the cases. Does it mean that if we give it more time for simulation then eventually the latter would outperform the former? Why so? Also, could you please explain the Reward distribution vs action figure? https://preview.redd.it/i10b82to4eaa1.jpg?width=616&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ce62f7ae0ba926faf4fd758b5e7294ad8fa9cd45 submitted by /u/RespondHour3530 [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

I am working on a project which will use reinforcement learning to automate processes in an industrial facility. The processes have sensors to check fluid levels, flow rates, temperatures, motor speeds, etc. as well as pump/motor speeds, valve/louver positions, etc. that influence these variables. I want to set up a simulation environment to simulate the processes and train the agents and I'm unfamiliar with how a simulation environment functions. I have the ability to build the environment but it's the set up and flow of data that I'm unsure of. The training data will be time series data which includes all of the values of the variables at any given time. I will outline what I would think might work but it really is just a guess, hopefully someone could tell me what might work better. I was thinking that I could create the environment to include all of the different pumps, valves, motors, etc., where each piece of equipment would be one agent in a multi agent system. From here I could feed the relevant sensor data to each agent for every time point. The sensor data that the agent receives at each time point would be the state, the actions that the agent could take would be making adjustments to the various equipment, ie. pump speed, and the reward would be based on a sensor reading of the output of the system. Does this sound like it is on the right track? submitted by /u/lifelifebalance [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Rational trigonometry is a very different way of looking at geometry. At its core are two key ideas. First, instead of distance, do all your calculations in terms of quadrance, which is distance squared. Second, instead of using angles to measure the separation between lines, use spread. What’s the point of these two changes? Quadrance […] Rational Trigonometry first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Geoff Lindsey contacted me recently to ask whether he could use the sheet music from one of my blog posts in a video he was making on Morse code snippets hidden in music. The sheet music appears about a minute into the video. After watching the video, his previious video played, a video about words […] Hidden messages in music first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 4 min )

The previous post commented that the law of tangents is much less familiar than the laws of sines and cosines. The law of cotangents is even more obscure. If you ask Google’s Ngram viewer to plot occurrences of “law of cotangents” over time, it will return “Ngrams not found: law of cotangents.” What is this […] Law of cotangents first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

I would have thought that the laws of sines, cosines, and tangents were all about equally familiar, but apparently that is not the case. Here’s a graph from Google’s Ngram viewer comparing the frequencies of law of sines, law of cosines, and law of tangents. As of 2019, the number of references to the laws […] Law of tangents first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Thanks in advance for any attention this no doubt poorly informed question receives. I am being asked to explain why a a stable diffusion like model produces particular outputs in particular cases. I know a small amount about neural nets. I know, for instance, that if I needed to explain why a categorizer based on a CNN reached a certain conclusion, I could at least TRY to do so with saliency maps or activation maximization. I don't know how to extend this to a model like Stable Diffusion, though. Example of what I'd like to understand how to do: I give the model a prompt such as 'man with bags under his eyes' and it is disproportionately likely to return images of a man who has African features. I'd like to be able to relate this: -- To properties of the training image set. Presumably, images that were labelled 'bags under eyes' were also of Africans, or were labelled as such -- To properties of the model. If this were a CNN categorizer, I might look for a filter that responded to both the 'bags under the eyes' and 'African' feature -- is it possible to do this in SD and similar models? submitted by /u/Hour-Performance-951 [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance but are compute- and memory-intensive. Quantization can reduce memory and accelerate inference. However, for LLMs beyond 100 billion parameters, existing methods cannot maintain accuracy or do not run efficiently on hardware. We propose SmoothQuant, a training-free, accuracy-preserving, and general-purpose post-training quantization (PTQ) solution to enable 8-bit weight, 8-bit activation (W8A8) quantization for LLMs that can be implemented efficiently. We observe that systematic outliers appear at fixed activation channels. Based on the fact that weights are easy to quantize while activations are not, SmoothQuant smooths the activation outliers by offline migrating the quantization difficulty from activations to weights with a mathematically equivalent transformation. SmoothQuant enables an INT8 quantization of both weights and activations for all the GEMMs in LLMs, including OPT-175B, BLOOM-176B, and GLM-130B. SmoothQuant has better hardware efficiency than existing techniques using mixed-precision activation quantization or weight-only quantization. We demonstrate up to 1.56x speedup and 2x memory reduction for LLMs with negligible loss in accuracy. Thanks to the hardware-friendly design, we integrate SmoothQuant into FasterTransformer, a state-of-the-art LLM serving framework, and achieve faster inference speed with half the number of GPUs compared to FP16. Our work offers a turn-key solution that reduces hardware costs and democratizes LLMs. Code is available at: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/smoothquant.  ( 2 min )

In this work, minibatch MCMC sampling for feedforward neural networks is made more feasible. To this end, it is proposed to sample subgroups of parameters via a blocked Gibbs sampling scheme. By partitioning the parameter space, sampling is possible irrespective of layer width. It is also possible to alleviate vanishing acceptance rates for increasing depth by reducing the proposal variance in deeper layers. Increasing the length of a non-convergent chain increases the predictive accuracy in classification tasks, so avoiding vanishing acceptance rates and consequently enabling longer chain runs have practical benefits. Moreover, non-convergent chain realizations aid in the quantification of predictive uncertainty. An open problem is how to perform minibatch MCMC sampling for feedforward neural networks in the presence of augmented data.  ( 2 min )

Owing to recent advances in thoracic electrical impedance tomography, a patient's hemodynamic function can be noninvasively and continuously estimated in real-time by surveilling a cardiac volume signal associated with stroke volume and cardiac output. In clinical applications, however, a cardiac volume signal is often of low quality, mainly because of the patient's deliberate movements or inevitable motions during clinical interventions. This study aims to develop a signal quality indexing method that assesses the influence of motion artifacts on transient cardiac volume signals. The assessment is performed on each cardiac cycle to take advantage of the periodicity and regularity in cardiac volume changes. Time intervals are identified using the synchronized electrocardiography system. We apply divergent machine-learning methods, which can be sorted into discriminative-model and manifold-learning approaches. The use of machine-learning could be suitable for our real-time monitoring application that requires fast inference and automation as well as high accuracy. In the clinical environment, the proposed method can be utilized to provide immediate warnings so that clinicians can minimize confusion regarding patients' conditions, reduce clinical resource utilization, and improve the confidence level of the monitoring system. Numerous experiments using actual EIT data validate the capability of cardiac volume signals degraded by motion artifacts to be accurately and automatically assessed in real-time by machine learning. The best model achieved an accuracy of 0.95, positive and negative predictive values of 0.96 and 0.86, sensitivity of 0.98, specificity of 0.77, and AUC of 0.96.  ( 2 min )

Optimal transport (OT) based distributional robust optimisation (DRO) has received some traction in the recent past. However, it is at a nascent stage but has a sound potential in robustifying the deep learning models. Interestingly, OT barycenters demonstrate a good robustness against adversarial attacks. Owing to the computationally expensive nature of OT barycenters, they have not been investigated under DRO framework. In this work, we propose a new barycenter, namely Beckman barycenter, which can be computed efficiently and used for training the network to defend against adversarial attacks in conjunction with adversarial training. We propose a novel formulation of Beckman barycenter and analytically obtain the barycenter using the marginals of the input image. We show that the Beckman barycenter can be used to train adversarially trained networks to improve the robustness. Our training is extremely efficient as it requires only a single epoch of training. Elaborate experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet demonstrate that training an adversarially robust network with Beckman barycenter can significantly increase the performance. Under auto attack, we get a a maximum boost of 10\% in CIFAR-10, 8.34\% in CIFAR-100 and 11.51\% in Tiny ImageNet. Our code is available at this http URL  ( 2 min )

The increase in complexity of autonomous systems is accompanied by a need of data-driven development and validation strategies. Advances in computer graphics and cloud clusters have opened the way to massive parallel high fidelity simulations to qualitatively address the large number of operational scenarios. However, exploration of all possible scenarios is still prohibitively expensive and outcomes of scenarios are generally unknown apriori. To this end, the authors propose a method based on bayesian optimization to efficiently learn generative models on scenarios that would deliver desired outcomes (e.g. collisions) with high probability. The methodology is integrated in an end-to-end framework, which uses the OpenSCENARIO standard to describe scenarios, and deploys highly configurable digital twins of the scenario participants on a Virtual Test Bed cluster.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we study a class of unconstrained and constrained bilevel optimization problems in which the lower-level part is a convex optimization problem, while the upper-level part is possibly a nonconvex optimization problem. In particular, we propose penalty methods for solving them, whose subproblems turn out to be a structured minimax problem and are suitably solved by a first-order method developed in this paper. Under some suitable assumptions, an \emph{operation complexity} of ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-4}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$ and ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-7}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$, measured by their fundamental operations, is established for the proposed penalty methods for finding an $\varepsilon$-KKT solution of the unconstrained and constrained bilevel optimization problems, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, the methodology and results in this paper are new.  ( 2 min )

Generative models, such as the method of normalizing flows, have been suggested as alternatives to the standard algorithms for generating lattice gauge field configurations. Studies with the method of normalizing flows demonstrate the proof of principle for simple models in two dimensions. However, further studies indicate that the training cost can be, in general, very high for large lattices. The poor scaling traits of current models indicate that moderate-size networks cannot efficiently handle the inherently multi-scale aspects of the problem, especially around critical points. We explore current models with limited acceptance rates for large lattices and examine new architectures inspired by effective field theories to improve scaling traits. We also discuss alternative ways of handling poor acceptance rates for large lattices.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we consider the problem of partitioning a small data sample of size $n$ drawn from a mixture of $2$ sub-gaussian distributions. Our work is motivated by the application of clustering individuals according to their population of origin using markers, when the divergence between the two populations is small. We are interested in the case that individual features are of low average quality $\gamma$, and we want to use as few of them as possible to correctly partition the sample. We consider semidefinite relaxation of an integer quadratic program which is formulated essentially as finding the maximum cut on a graph where edge weights in the cut represent dissimilarity scores between two nodes based on their features. A small simulation result in Blum, Coja-Oghlan, Frieze and Zhou (2007, 2009) shows that even when the sample size $n$ is small, by increasing $p$ so that $np= \Omega(1/\gamma^2)$, one can classify a mixture of two product populations using the spectral method therein with success rate reaching an ``oracle'' curve. There the ``oracle'' was computed assuming that distributions were known, where success rate means the ratio between correctly classified individuals and the sample size $n$. In this work, we show the theoretical underpinning of this observed concentration of measure phenomenon in high dimensions, simultaneously for the semidefinite optimization goal and the spectral method, where the input is based on the gram matrix computed from centered data. We allow a full range of tradeoffs between the sample size and the number of features such that the product of these two is lower bounded by $1/{\gamma^2}$ so long as the number of features $p$ is lower bounded by $1/\gamma$.  ( 2 min )

We study sample efficient reinforcement learning (RL) under the general framework of interactive decision making, which includes Markov decision process (MDP), partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and predictive state representation (PSR) as special cases. Toward finding the minimum assumption that empowers sample efficient learning, we propose a novel complexity measure, generalized eluder coefficient (GEC), which characterizes the fundamental tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in online interactive decision making. In specific, GEC captures the hardness of exploration by comparing the error of predicting the performance of the updated policy with the in-sample training error evaluated on the historical data. We show that RL problems with low GEC form a remarkably rich class, which subsumes low Bellman eluder dimension problems, bilinear class, low witness rank problems, PO-bilinear class, and generalized regular PSR, where generalized regular PSR, a new tractable PSR class identified by us, includes nearly all known tractable POMDPs and PSRs. Furthermore, in terms of algorithm design, we propose a generic posterior sampling algorithm, which can be implemented in both model-free and model-based fashion, under both fully observable and partially observable settings. The proposed algorithm modifies the standard posterior sampling algorithm in two aspects: (i) we use an optimistic prior distribution that biases towards hypotheses with higher values and (ii) a loglikelihood function is set to be the empirical loss evaluated on the historical data, where the choice of loss function supports both model-free and model-based learning. We prove that the proposed algorithm is sample efficient by establishing a sublinear regret upper bound in terms of GEC. In summary, we provide a new and unified understanding of both fully observable and partially observable RL.  ( 3 min )

Many modern deep-learning techniques do not work without enormous datasets. At the same time, several fields demand methods working in scarcity of data. This problem is even more complex when the samples have varying structures, as in the case of graphs. Graph representation learning techniques have recently proven successful in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, the employed architectures perform miserably when faced with data scarcity. On the other hand, few-shot learning allows employing modern deep learning models in scarce data regimes without waiving their effectiveness. In this work, we tackle the problem of few-shot graph classification, showing that equipping a simple distance metric learning baseline with a state-of-the-art graph embedder allows to obtain competitive results on the task.While the simplicity of the architecture is enough to outperform more complex ones, it also allows straightforward additions. To this end, we show that additional improvements may be obtained by encouraging a task-conditioned embedding space. Finally, we propose a MixUp-based online data augmentation technique acting in the latent space and show its effectiveness on the task.  ( 2 min )

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the agent might have access to offline data from related tasks in the same target environment. While offline data is increasingly being used to aid policy optimization via offline RL, our observation is that it can be a surprisingly rich source of information for preference learning as well. We propose an approach that uses an offline dataset to craft preference queries via pool-based active learning, learns a distribution over reward functions, and optimizes a corresponding policy via offline RL. Crucially, our proposed approach does not require actual physical rollouts or an accurate simulator for either the reward learning or policy optimization steps. To test our approach, we first evaluate existing offline RL benchmarks for their suitability for offline reward learning. Surprisingly, for many offline RL domains, we find that simply using a trivial reward function results good policy performance, making these domains ill-suited for evaluating learned rewards. To address this, we identify a subset of existing offline RL benchmarks that are well suited for offline reward learning and also propose new offline apprenticeship learning benchmarks which allow for more open-ended behaviors. When evaluated on this curated set of domains, our empirical results suggest that combining offline RL with learned human preferences can enable an agent to learn to perform novel tasks that were not explicitly shown in the offline data.  ( 2 min )

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the challenge of how to discriminatively vectorize graphs. To address this, we propose a method called Iterative Graph Self-Distillation (IGSD) which learns graph-level representation in an unsupervised manner through instance discrimination using a self-supervised contrastive learning approach. IGSD involves a teacher-student distillation process that uses graph diffusion augmentations and constructs the teacher model using an exponential moving average of the student model. The intuition behind IGSD is to predict the teacher network representation of the graph pairs under different augmented views. As a natural extension, we also apply IGSD to semi-supervised scenarios by jointly regularizing the network with both supervised and self-supervised contrastive loss. Finally, we show that finetuning the IGSD-trained models with self-training can further improve the graph representation power. Empirically, we achieve significant and consistent performance gain on various graph datasets in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings, which well validates the superiority of IGSD.  ( 2 min )

High-dimensional spatio-temporal dynamics can often be encoded in a low-dimensional subspace. Engineering applications for modeling, characterization, design, and control of such large-scale systems often rely on dimensionality reduction to make solutions computationally tractable in real-time. Common existing paradigms for dimensionality reduction include linear methods, such as the singular value decomposition (SVD), and nonlinear methods, such as variants of convolutional autoencoders (CAE). However, these encoding techniques lack the ability to efficiently represent the complexity associated with spatio-temporal data, which often requires variable geometry, non-uniform grid resolution, adaptive meshing, and/or parametric dependencies. To resolve these practical engineering challenges, we propose a general framework called Neural Implicit Flow (NIF) that enables a mesh-agnostic, low-rank representation of large-scale, parametric, spatial-temporal data. NIF consists of two modified multilayer perceptrons (MLPs): (i) ShapeNet, which isolates and represents the spatial complexity, and (ii) ParameterNet, which accounts for any other input complexity, including parametric dependencies, time, and sensor measurements. We demonstrate the utility of NIF for parametric surrogate modeling, enabling the interpretable representation and compression of complex spatio-temporal dynamics, efficient many-spatial-query tasks, and improved generalization performance for sparse reconstruction.  ( 2 min )

Twinned regression methods are designed to solve the dual problem to the original regression problem, predicting differences between regression targets rather then the targets themselves. A solution to the original regression problem can be obtained by ensembling predicted differences between the targets of an unknown data point and multiple known anchor data points. We explore different aspects of twinned regression methods: (1) We decompose different steps in twinned regression algorithms and examine their contributions to the final performance, (2) We examine the intrinsic ensemble quality, (3) We combine twin neural network regression with k-nearest neighbor regression to design a more accurate and efficient regression method, and (4) we develop a simplified semi-supervised regression scheme.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in every possible state implies that the agent must understand, while also learning to maximize its reward, to ignore irrelevant actions such as $\textit{inapplicable actions}$ (i.e. actions that have no effect on the environment when performed in a given state). Knowing this information can help reduce the sample complexity of RL algorithms by masking the inapplicable actions from the policy distribution to only explore actions relevant to finding an optimal policy. While this technique has been formalized for quite some time within the Automated Planning community with the concept of precondition in the STRIPS language, RL algorithms have never formally taken advantage of this information to prune the search space to explore. This is typically done in an ad-hoc manner with hand-crafted domain logic added to the RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a more systematic approach to introduce this knowledge into the algorithm. We (i) standardize the way knowledge can be manually specified to the agent; and (ii) present a new framework to autonomously learn the partial action model encapsulating the precondition of an action jointly with the policy. We show experimentally that learning inapplicable actions greatly improves the sample efficiency of the algorithm by providing a reliable signal to mask out irrelevant actions. Moreover, we demonstrate that thanks to the transferability of the knowledge acquired, it can be reused in other tasks and domains to make the learning process more efficient.  ( 2 min )

This document is a concise summary of many key results in single-agent reinforcement learning (RL). The intended audience are those who already have some familiarity with RL and are looking to review, reference and/or remind themselves of important ideas in the field.  ( 2 min )

Neural networks are composed of multiple layers arranged in a hierarchical structure jointly trained with a gradient-based optimization, where the errors are back-propagated from the last layer back to the first one. At each optimization step, neurons at a given layer receive feedback from neurons belonging to higher layers of the hierarchy. In this paper, we propose to complement this traditional 'between-layer' feedback with additional 'within-layer' feedback to encourage the diversity of the activations within the same layer. To this end, we measure the pairwise similarity between the outputs of the neurons and use it to model the layer's overall diversity. We present an extensive empirical study confirming that the proposed approach enhances the performance of several state-of-the-art neural network models in multiple tasks. The code is publically available at \url{https://github.com/firasl/AAAI-23-WLD-Reg}  ( 2 min )

In many imaging modalities, objects of interest can occur in a variety of locations and poses (i.e. are subject to translations and rotations in 2d or 3d), but the location and pose of an object does not change its semantics (i.e. the object's essence). That is, the specific location and rotation of an airplane in satellite imagery, or the 3d rotation of a chair in a natural image, or the rotation of a particle in a cryo-electron micrograph, do not change the intrinsic nature of those objects. Here, we consider the problem of learning semantic representations of objects that are invariant to pose and location in a fully unsupervised manner. We address shortcomings in previous approaches to this problem by introducing TARGET-VAE, a translation and rotation group-equivariant variational autoencoder framework. TARGET-VAE combines three core innovations: 1) a rotation and translation group-equivariant encoder architecture, 2) a structurally disentangled distribution over latent rotation, translation, and a rotation-translation-invariant semantic object representation, which are jointly inferred by the approximate inference network, and 3) a spatially equivariant generator network. In comprehensive experiments, we show that TARGET-VAE learns disentangled representations without supervision that significantly improve upon, and avoid the pathologies of, previous methods. When trained on images highly corrupted by rotation and translation, the semantic representations learned by TARGET-VAE are similar to those learned on consistently posed objects, dramatically improving clustering in the semantic latent space. Furthermore, TARGET-VAE is able to perform remarkably accurate unsupervised pose and location inference. We expect methods like TARGET-VAE will underpin future approaches for unsupervised object generation, pose prediction, and object detection.  ( 2 min )

Random reshuffling, which randomly permutes the dataset each epoch, is widely adopted in model training because it yields faster convergence than with-replacement sampling. Recent studies indicate greedily chosen data orderings can further speed up convergence empirically, at the cost of using more computation and memory. However, greedy ordering lacks theoretical justification and has limited utility due to its non-trivial memory and computation overhead. In this paper, we first formulate an example-ordering framework named herding and answer affirmatively that SGD with herding converges at the rate $O(T^{-2/3})$ on smooth, non-convex objectives, faster than the $O(n^{1/3}T^{-2/3})$ obtained by random reshuffling, where $n$ denotes the number of data points and $T$ denotes the total number of iterations. To reduce the memory overhead, we leverage discrepancy minimization theory to propose an online Gradient Balancing algorithm (GraB) that enjoys the same rate as herding, while reducing the memory usage from $O(nd)$ to just $O(d)$ and computation from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$, where $d$ denotes the model dimension. We show empirically on applications including MNIST, CIFAR10, WikiText and GLUE that GraB can outperform random reshuffling in terms of both training and validation performance, and even outperform state-of-the-art greedy ordering while reducing memory usage over $100\times$.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be considered as a sequence modeling task: given a sequence of past state-action-reward experiences, an agent predicts a sequence of next actions. In this work, we propose State-Action-Reward Transformer (StARformer) for visual RL, which explicitly models short-term state-action-reward representations (StAR-representations), essentially introducing a Markovian-like inductive bias to improve long-term modeling. Our approach first extracts StAR-representations by self-attending image state patches, action, and reward tokens within a short temporal window. These are then combined with pure image state representations -- extracted as convolutional features, to perform self-attention over the whole sequence. Our experiments show that StARformer outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformer-based method on image-based Atari and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks, in both offline-RL and imitation learning settings. StARformer is also more compliant with longer sequences of inputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/elicassion/StARformer.  ( 2 min )

Data augmentation (DA) is a powerful workhorse for bolstering performance in modern machine learning. Specific augmentations like translations and scaling in computer vision are traditionally believed to improve generalization by generating new (artificial) data from the same distribution. However, this traditional viewpoint does not explain the success of prevalent augmentations in modern machine learning (e.g. randomized masking, cutout, mixup), that greatly alter the training data distribution. In this work, we develop a new theoretical framework to characterize the impact of a general class of DA on underparameterized and overparameterized linear model generalization. Our framework reveals that DA induces implicit spectral regularization through a combination of two distinct effects: a) manipulating the relative proportion of eigenvalues of the data covariance matrix in a training-data-dependent manner, and b) uniformly boosting the entire spectrum of the data covariance matrix through ridge regression. These effects, when applied to popular augmentations, give rise to a wide variety of phenomena, including discrepancies in generalization between over-parameterized and under-parameterized regimes and differences between regression and classification tasks. Our framework highlights the nuanced and sometimes surprising impacts of DA on generalization, and serves as a testbed for novel augmentation design.  ( 2 min )

The ever-increasing computational complexity of deep learning models makes their training and deployment difficult on various cloud and edge platforms. Replacing floating-point arithmetic with low-bit integer arithmetic is a promising approach to save energy, memory footprint, and latency of deep learning models. As such, quantization has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, using integer numbers to form a fully functional integer training pipeline including forward pass, back-propagation, and stochastic gradient descent is not studied in detail. Our empirical and mathematical results reveal that integer arithmetic seems to be enough to train deep learning models. Unlike recent proposals, instead of quantization, we directly switch the number representation of computations. Our novel training method forms a fully integer training pipeline that does not change the trajectory of the loss and accuracy compared to floating-point, nor does it need any special hyper-parameter tuning, distribution adjustment, or gradient clipping. Our experimental results show that our proposed method is effective in a wide variety of tasks such as classification (including vision transformers), object detection, and semantic segmentation.  ( 2 min )

Capsule neural networks replace simple, scalar-valued neurons with vector-valued capsules. They are motivated by the pattern recognition system in the human brain, where complex objects are decomposed into a hierarchy of simpler object parts. Such a hierarchy is referred to as a parse-tree. Conceptually, capsule neural networks have been defined to realize such parse-trees. The capsule neural network (CapsNet), by Sabour, Frosst, and Hinton, is the first actual implementation of the conceptual idea of capsule neural networks. CapsNets achieved state-of-the-art performance on simple image recognition tasks with fewer parameters and greater robustness to affine transformations than comparable approaches. This sparked extensive follow-up research. However, despite major efforts, no work was able to scale the CapsNet architecture to more reasonable-sized datasets. Here, we provide a reason for this failure and argue that it is most likely not possible to scale CapsNets beyond toy examples. In particular, we show that the concept of a parse-tree, the main idea behind capsule neuronal networks, is not present in CapsNets. We also show theoretically and experimentally that CapsNets suffer from a vanishing gradient problem that results in the starvation of many capsules during training.  ( 2 min )

Analog computing is attractive compared to digital computing due to its potential for achieving higher computational density and higher energy efficiency. However, unlike digital circuits, conventional analog computing circuits cannot be easily mapped across different process nodes due to differences in transistor biasing regimes, temperature variations and limited dynamic range. In this work, we generalize the previously reported margin-propagation-based analog computing framework for designing novel \textit{shape-based analog computing} (S-AC) circuits that can be easily cross-mapped across different process nodes. Similar to digital designs S-AC designs can also be scaled for precision, speed, and power. As a proof-of-concept, we show several examples of S-AC circuits implementing mathematical functions that are commonly used in machine learning (ML) architectures. Using circuit simulations we demonstrate that the circuit input/output characteristics remain robust when mapped from a planar CMOS 180nm process to a FinFET 7nm process. Also, using benchmark datasets we demonstrate that the classification accuracy of a S-AC based neural network remains robust when mapped across the two processes and to changes in temperature.  ( 2 min )

The approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search problem is fundamental to efficiently serving many real-world machine learning applications. A number of techniques have been developed for ANN search that are efficient, accurate, and scalable. However, such techniques typically have a number of parameters that affect the speed-recall tradeoff, and exhibit poor performance when such parameters aren't properly set. Tuning these parameters has traditionally been a manual process, demanding in-depth knowledge of the underlying search algorithm. This is becoming an increasingly unrealistic demand as ANN search grows in popularity. To tackle this obstacle to ANN adoption, this work proposes a constrained optimization-based approach to tuning quantization-based ANN algorithms. Our technique takes just a desired search cost or recall as input, and then generates tunings that, empirically, are very close to the speed-recall Pareto frontier and give leading performance on standard benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

Conversations have become a critical data format on social media platforms. Understanding conversation from emotion, content and other aspects also attracts increasing attention from researchers due to its widespread application in human-computer interaction. In real-world environments, we often encounter the problem of incomplete modalities, which has become a core issue of conversation understanding. To address this problem, researchers propose various methods. However, existing approaches are mainly designed for individual utterances rather than conversational data, which cannot fully exploit temporal and speaker information in conversations. To this end, we propose a novel framework for incomplete multimodal learning in conversations, called "Graph Complete Network (GCNet)", filling the gap of existing works. Our GCNet contains two well-designed graph neural network-based modules, "Speaker GNN" and "Temporal GNN", to capture temporal and speaker dependencies. To make full use of complete and incomplete data, we jointly optimize classification and reconstruction tasks in an end-to-end manner. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on three benchmark conversational datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our GCNet is superior to existing state-of-the-art approaches in incomplete multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/GCNet.  ( 2 min )

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging computing paradigm that extends cloud computing to the network edge to support resource-intensive applications on mobile devices. As a crucial problem in MEC, service migration needs to decide how to migrate user services for maintaining the Quality-of-Service when users roam between MEC servers with limited coverage and capacity. However, finding an optimal migration policy is intractable due to the dynamic MEC environment and user mobility. Many existing studies make centralized migration decisions based on complete system-level information, which is time-consuming and also lacks desirable scalability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel learning-driven method, which is user-centric and can make effective online migration decisions by utilizing incomplete system-level information. Specifically, the service migration problem is modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). To solve the POMDP, we design a new encoder network that combines a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and an embedding matrix for effective extraction of hidden information, and further propose a tailored off-policy actor-critic algorithm for efficient training. The extensive experimental results based on real-world mobility traces demonstrate that this new method consistently outperforms both the heuristic and state-of-the-art learning-driven algorithms and can achieve near-optimal results on various MEC scenarios.  ( 2 min )

Graph mining algorithms have been playing a significant role in myriad fields over the years. However, despite their promising performance on various graph analytical tasks, most of these algorithms lack fairness considerations. As a consequence, they could lead to discrimination towards certain populations when exploited in human-centered applications. Recently, algorithmic fairness has been extensively studied in graph-based applications. In contrast to algorithmic fairness on independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, fairness in graph mining has exclusive backgrounds, taxonomies, and fulfilling techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction of existing literature under the context of fair graph mining. Specifically, we propose a novel taxonomy of fairness notions on graphs, which sheds light on their connections and differences. We further present an organized summary of existing techniques that promote fairness in graph mining. Finally, we summarize the widely used datasets in this emerging research field and provide insights on current research challenges and open questions, aiming at encouraging cross-breeding ideas and further advances.  ( 2 min )

We show how to achieve differential privacy with no or reduced added noise, based on the empirical noise in the data itself. Unlike previous works on noiseless privacy, the empirical viewpoint avoids making any explicit assumptions about the random process generating the data.  ( 2 min )

A tree-based online search algorithm iteratively simulates trajectories and updates action-values of a set of states stored in a tree structure. It works reasonably well in practice but fails to take advantage of the information gathered from similar states. Depending upon the smoothness of the action-value function, a simple way to interpolate information among similar states is to perform online learning; policy gradient search provides a practical algorithm to achieve this. However, policy gradient search does not have an explicit exploration mechanism, which is present in tree-based online search algorithms. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective online search algorithm, named Exploratory Policy Gradient Search (ExPoSe), that leverages information sharing among states by directly updating the search policy parameters while following a well-defined exploration mechanism during the online search. We conduct experiments on several decision-making problems, including Atari games, Sokoban and Hamiltonian cycle search in sparse graphs and show that ExPoSe consistently outperforms popular online search algorithms across all domains.  ( 2 min )

Social reviews have dominated the web and become a plausible source of product information. People and businesses use such information for decision-making. Businesses also make use of social information to spread fake information using a single user, groups of users, or a bot trained to generate fraudulent content. Many studies proposed approaches based on user behaviors and review text to address the challenges of fraud detection. To provide an exhaustive literature review, social fraud detection is reviewed using a framework that considers three key components: the review itself, the user who carries out the review, and the item being reviewed. As features are extracted for the component representation, a feature-wise review is provided based on behavioral, text-based features and their combination. With this framework, a comprehensive overview of approaches is presented including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning. The supervised approaches for fraud detection are introduced and categorized into two sub-categories; classical, and deep learning. The lack of labeled datasets is explained and potential solutions are suggested. To help new researchers in the area develop a better understanding, a topic analysis and an overview of future directions is provided in each step of the proposed systematic framework.  ( 2 min )

State-space models constitute an effective modeling tool to describe multivariate time series and operate by maintaining an updated representation of the system state from which predictions are made. Within this framework, relational inductive biases, e.g., associated with functional dependencies existing among signals, are not explicitly exploited leaving unattended great opportunities for effective modeling approaches. The manuscript aims, for the first time, at filling this gap by matching state-space modeling and spatio-temporal data where the relational information, say the functional graph capturing latent dependencies, is learned directly from data and is allowed to change over time. Within a probabilistic formulation that accounts for the uncertainty in the data-generating process, an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed to learn the state-space model end-to-end on a downstream task. The proposed methodological framework generalizes several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates to be effective in extracting meaningful relational information while achieving optimal forecasting performance in controlled environments.  ( 2 min )

We investigate gradient descent training of wide neural networks and the corresponding implicit bias in function space. For univariate regression, we show that the solution of training a width-$n$ shallow ReLU network is within $n^{- 1/2}$ of the function which fits the training data and whose difference from the initial function has the smallest 2-norm of the second derivative weighted by a curvature penalty that depends on the probability distribution that is used to initialize the network parameters. We compute the curvature penalty function explicitly for various common initialization procedures. For instance, asymmetric initialization with a uniform distribution yields a constant curvature penalty, and thence the solution function is the natural cubic spline interpolation of the training data. \hj{For stochastic gradient descent we obtain the same implicit bias result.} We obtain a similar result for different activation functions. For multivariate regression we show an analogous result, whereby the second derivative is replaced by the Radon transform of a fractional Laplacian. For initialization schemes that yield a constant penalty function, the solutions are polyharmonic splines. Moreover, we show that the training trajectories are captured by trajectories of smoothing splines with decreasing regularization strength.  ( 2 min )

Adversarial robustness studies the worst-case performance of a machine learning model to ensure safety and reliability. With the proliferation of deep-learning-based technology, the potential risks associated with model development and deployment can be amplified and become dreadful vulnerabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of research topics and foundational principles of research methods for adversarial robustness of deep learning models, including attacks, defenses, verification, and novel applications.  ( 2 min )

Bias-scalable analog computing is attractive for implementing machine learning (ML) processors with distinct power-performance specifications. For instance, ML implementations for server workloads are focused on higher computational throughput for faster training, whereas ML implementations for edge devices are focused on energy-efficient inference. In this paper, we demonstrate the implementation of bias-scalable approximate analog computing circuits using the generalization of the margin-propagation principle called shape-based analog computing (S-AC). The resulting S-AC core integrates several near-memory compute elements, which include: (a) non-linear activation functions; (b) inner-product compute circuits; and (c) a mixed-signal compressive memory, all of which can be scaled for performance or power while preserving its functionality. Using measured results from prototypes fabricated in a 180nm CMOS process, we demonstrate that the performance of computing modules remains robust to transistor biasing and variations in temperature. In this paper, we also demonstrate the effect of bias-scalability and computational accuracy on a simple ML regression task.  ( 2 min )

Automatic fetal brain tissue segmentation can enhance the quantitative assessment of brain development at this critical stage. Deep learning methods represent the state of the art in medical image segmentation and have also achieved impressive results in brain segmentation. However, effective training of a deep learning model to perform this task requires a large number of training images to represent the rapid development of the transient fetal brain structures. On the other hand, manual multi-label segmentation of a large number of 3D images is prohibitive. To address this challenge, we segmented 272 training images, covering 19-39 gestational weeks, using an automatic multi-atlas segmentation strategy based on deformable registration and probabilistic atlas fusion, and manually corrected large errors in those segmentations. Since this process generated a large training dataset with noisy segmentations, we developed a novel label smoothing procedure and a loss function to train a deep learning model with smoothed noisy segmentations. Our proposed methods properly account for the uncertainty in tissue boundaries. We evaluated our method on 23 manually-segmented test images of a separate set of fetuses. Results show that our method achieves an average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.893 and 0.916 for the transient structures of younger and older fetuses, respectively. Our method generated results that were significantly more accurate than several state-of-the-art methods including nnU-Net that achieved the closest results to our method. Our trained model can serve as a valuable tool to enhance the accuracy and reproducibility of fetal brain analysis in MRI.  ( 2 min )

There is a recent and growing literature on large-width asymptotic properties of Gaussian neural networks (NNs), namely NNs whose weights are initialized as Gaussian distributions. Two popular problems are: i) the study of the large-width distributions of NNs, which characterizes the infinitely wide limit of a rescaled NN in terms of a Gaussian stochastic process; ii) the study of the large-width training dynamics of NNs, which characterizes the infinitely wide dynamics in terms of a deterministic kernel, referred to as the neural tangent kernel (NTK), and shows that, for a sufficiently large width, the gradient descent achieves zero training error at a linear rate. In this paper, we consider these problems for $\alpha$-Stable NNs, namely NNs whose weights are initialized as $\alpha$-Stable distributions with $\alpha\in(0,2]$. First, for $\alpha$-Stable NNs with a ReLU activation function, we show that if the NN's width goes to infinity then a rescaled NN converges weakly to an $\alpha$-Stable stochastic process. As a difference with respect to the Gaussian setting, our result shows that the choice of the activation function affects the scaling of the NN, that is: to achieve the infinitely wide $\alpha$-Stable process, the ReLU activation requires an additional logarithmic term in the scaling with respect to sub-linear activations. Then, we study the large-width training dynamics of $\alpha$-Stable ReLU-NNs, characterizing the infinitely wide dynamics in terms of a random kernel, referred to as the $\alpha$-Stable NTK, and showing that, for a sufficiently large width, the gradient descent achieves zero training error at a linear rate. The randomness of the $\alpha$-Stable NTK is a further difference with respect to the Gaussian setting, that is: within the $\alpha$-Stable setting, the randomness of the NN at initialization does not vanish in the large-width regime of the training.  ( 3 min )

Various real-world scientific applications involve the mathematical modeling of complex uncertain systems with numerous unknown parameters. Accurate parameter estimation is often practically infeasible in such systems, as the available training data may be insufficient and the cost of acquiring additional data may be high. In such cases, it is desirable to represent the model uncertainty in a Bayesian paradigm, based on which we can design robust operators retaining the best overall performance across all possible models and design optimal experiments that can effectively reduce uncertainty to enhance the performance of such operators maximally. While objective-based uncertainty quantification (objective-UQ) based on MOCU (mean objective cost of uncertainty) has been an effective means for quantifying uncertainty in complex systems, a major drawback has been the high computational cost of estimating MOCU. In this work, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the computational cost for objective-UQ via MOCU based on a data-driven approach. We adopt a neural message-passing model for surrogate modeling, incorporating a novel axiomatic constraint loss that penalizes an increase in the estimated system uncertainty. As an illustrative example, we consider the optimal experimental design (OED) problem for uncertain Kuramoto models, where the goal is to predict the experiments that can most effectively enhance robust synchronization performance through uncertainty reduction. We show that our proposed approach can accelerate MOCU-based OED by four to five orders of magnitude, virtually without any visible performance loss compared to the state-of-the-art. The proposed approach is applicable to general OED tasks, beyond the Kuramoto model.  ( 2 min )

In this letter, we propose a novel semi-supervised subspace clustering method, which is able to simultaneously augment the initial supervisory information and construct a discriminative affinity matrix. By representing the limited amount of supervisory information as a pairwise constraint matrix, we observe that the ideal affinity matrix for clustering shares the same low-rank structure as the ideal pairwise constraint matrix. Thus, we stack the two matrices into a 3-D tensor, where a global low-rank constraint is imposed to promote the affinity matrix construction and augment the initial pairwise constraints synchronously. Besides, we use the local geometry structure of input samples to complement the global low-rank prior to achieve better affinity matrix learning. The proposed model is formulated as a Laplacian graph regularized convex low-rank tensor representation problem, which is further solved with an alternative iterative algorithm. In addition, we propose to refine the affinity matrix with the augmented pairwise constraints. Comprehensive experimental results on eight commonly-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanxingLu/Subspace-Clustering.  ( 2 min )

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a class of effective deep learning models for node classification tasks; yet their predictive capability may be severely compromised under adversarially designed unnoticeable perturbations to the graph structure and/or node data. Most of the current work on graph adversarial attacks aims at lowering the overall prediction accuracy, but we argue that the resulting abnormal model performance may catch attention easily and invite quick counterattack. Moreover, attacks through modification of existing graph data may be hard to conduct if good security protocols are implemented. In this work, we consider an easier attack harder to be noticed, through adversarially patching the graph with new nodes and edges. The attack is universal: it targets a single node each time and flips its connection to the same set of patch nodes. The attack is unnoticeable: it does not modify the predictions of nodes other than the target. We develop an algorithm, named GUAP, that achieves high attack success rate but meanwhile preserves the prediction accuracy. GUAP is fast to train by employing a sampling strategy. We demonstrate that a 5% sampling in each epoch yields 20x speedup in training, with only a slight degradation in attack performance. Additionally, we show that the adversarial patch trained with the graph convolutional network transfers well to other GNNs, such as the graph attention network.  ( 2 min )

Various applications for inter-machine communications are on the rise. Whether it is for autonomous driving vehicles or the internet of everything, machines are more connected than ever to improve their performance in fulfilling a given task. While in traditional communications the goal has often been to reconstruct the underlying message, under the emerging task-oriented paradigm, the goal of communication is to enable the receiving end to make more informed decisions or more precise estimates/computations. Motivated by these recent developments, in this paper, we perform an indirect design of the communications in a multi-agent system (MAS) in which agents cooperate to maximize the averaged sum of discounted one-stage rewards of a collaborative task. Due to the bit-budgeted communications between the agents, each agent should efficiently represent its local observation and communicate an abstracted version of the observations to improve the collaborative task performance. We first show that this problem can be approximated as a form of data-quantization problem which we call task-oriented data compression (TODC). We then introduce the state-aggregation for information compression algorithm (SAIC) to solve the formulated TODC problem. It is shown that SAIC is able to achieve near-optimal performance in terms of the achieved sum of discounted rewards. The proposed algorithm is applied to a geometric consensus problem and its performance is compared with several benchmarks. Numerical experiments confirm the promise of this indirect design approach for task-oriented multi-agent communications.  ( 3 min )

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm is determined by several, possibly conflicting attributes. The aim is to optimize a 'primary' attribute subject to user-provided constraints on other 'secondary' attributes. We assume that the attributes can be estimated using samples from the arms' distributions, and that the estimators enjoy suitable concentration properties. We propose an algorithm called Con-LCB that guarantees a logarithmic regret, i.e., the average number of plays of all non-optimal arms is at most logarithmic in the horizon. The algorithm also outputs a Boolean flag that correctly identifies, with high probability, whether the given instance is feasible/infeasible with respect to the constraints. We also show that Con-LCB is optimal within a universal constant, i.e., that more sophisticated algorithms cannot do much better universally. Finally, we establish a fundamental trade-off between regret minimization and feasibility identification. Our framework finds natural applications, for instance, in financial portfolio optimization, where risk constrained maximization of expected return is meaningful.  ( 2 min )

Many deep learning-based computerized respiratory sound analysis methods have previously been developed. However, these studies focus on either lung sound only or tracheal sound only. The effectiveness of using a lung sound analysis algorithm on tracheal sound and vice versa has never been investigated. Furthermore, no one knows whether using lung and tracheal sounds together in training a respiratory sound analysis model is beneficial. In this study, we first constructed a tracheal sound database, HF_Tracheal_V1, containing 10448 15-s tracheal sound recordings, 21741 inhalation labels, 15858 exhalation labels, and 6414 continuous adventitious sound (CAS) labels. HF_Tracheal_V1 and our previously built lung sound database, HF_Lung_V2, were either combined (mixed set), used one after the other (domain adaptation), or used alone to train convolutional neural network bidirectional gate recurrent unit models for inhalation, exhalation, and CAS detection in lung and tracheal sounds. The results revealed that the models trained using lung sound alone performed poorly in tracheal sound analysis and vice versa. However, mixed set training or domain adaptation improved the performance for 1) inhalation and exhalation detection in lung sounds and 2) inhalation, exhalation, and CAS detection in tracheal sounds compared to positive controls (the models trained using lung sound alone and used in lung sound analysis and vice versa). In particular, the model trained on the mixed set had great flexibility to serve two purposes, lung and tracheal sound analyses, at the same time.  ( 3 min )

We study the best-arm identification (BAI) problem with a fixed budget and contextual (covariate) information. In each round of an adaptive experiment, after observing contextual information, we choose a treatment arm using past observations and current context. Our goal is to identify the best treatment arm, which is a treatment arm with the maximal expected reward marginalized over the contextual distribution, with a minimal probability of misidentification. In this study, we consider a class of nonparametric bandit models that converge to location-shift models when the gaps go to zero. First, we derive lower bounds of the misidentification probability for a certain class of strategies and bandit models (probabilistic models of potential outcomes) under a small-gap regime. A small-gap regime is a situation where gaps of the expected rewards between the best and suboptimal treatment arms go to zero, which corresponds to one of the worst cases in identifying the best treatment arm. We then develop the ``Random Sampling (RS)-Augmented Inverse Probability weighting (AIPW) strategy,'' which is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the probability of misidentification under the strategy matches the lower bound when the budget goes to infinity in the small-gap regime. The RS-AIPW strategy consists of the RS rule tracking a target sample allocation ratio and the recommendation rule using the AIPW estimator.  ( 2 min )

We provide the results of pattern recognition experiments on mathematical expressions. We give a few examples of conjectured results. None of which was thoroughly checked for novelty. We did not attempt to prove all the relations found and focused on their generation.  ( 2 min )

Many real-world classification problems are cost-sensitive in nature, such that the misclassification costs vary between data instances. Cost-sensitive learning adapts classification algorithms to account for differences in misclassification costs. Stacking is an ensemble method that uses predictions from several classifiers as the training data for another classifier, which in turn makes the final classification decision. While a large body of empirical work exists where stacking is applied in various domains, very few of these works take the misclassification costs into account. In fact, there is no consensus in the literature as to what cost-sensitive stacking is. In this paper we perform extensive experiments with the aim of establishing what the appropriate setup for a cost-sensitive stacking ensemble is. Our experiments, conducted on twelve datasets from a number of application domains, using real, instance-dependent misclassification costs, show that for best performance, both levels of stacking require cost-sensitive classification decision.  ( 2 min )

Data-driven modeling is an approach in energy systems modeling that has been gaining popularity. In data-driven modeling, machine learning methods such as linear regression, neural networks or decision-tree based methods are being applied. While these methods do not require domain knowledge, they are sensitive to data quality. Therefore, improving data quality in a dataset is beneficial for creating machine learning-based models. The improvement of data quality can be implemented through preprocessing methods. A selected type of preprocessing is feature engineering, which focuses on evaluating and improving the quality of certain features inside the dataset. Feature engineering methods include methods such as feature creation, feature expansion, or feature selection. In this work, a Python framework containing different feature engineering methods is presented. This framework contains different methods for feature creation, expansion and selection; in addition, methods for transforming or filtering data are implemented. The implementation of the framework is based on the Python library scikit-learn. The framework is demonstrated on a case study of a use case from energy demand prediction. A data-driven model is created including selected feature engineering methods. The results show an improvement in prediction accuracy through the engineered features.  ( 2 min )

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a computational perspective. Currently, only moment-based methods enjoy theoretical guarantees while likelihood-based methods are dominated by heuristics such as Expectation-Maximization that are known to fail in simple examples. In this work, we propose a new algorithm to compute the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) in a Gaussian mixture model. Our method is based on gradient descent over the space of probability measures equipped with the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao geometry for which we establish convergence guarantees. In practice, it can be approximated using an interacting particle system where the weight and location of particles are updated alternately. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared not only to classical benchmarks but also to similar gradient descent algorithms with respect to simpler geometries. In particular, these simulations illustrate the benefit of updating both weight and location of the interacting particles.  ( 2 min )

Recommender systems (RS) commonly retrieve potential candidate items for users from a massive number of items by modeling user interests based on historical interactions. However, historical interaction data is highly sparse, and most items are long-tail items, which limits the representation learning for item discovery. This problem is further augmented by the discovery of novel or cold-start items. For example, after a user displays interest in bitcoin financial investment shows in the podcast space, a recommender system may want to suggest, e.g., a newly released blockchain episode from a more technical show. Episode correlations help the discovery, especially when interaction data of episodes is limited. Accordingly, we build upon the classical Two-Tower model and introduce the novel Multi-Source Augmentations using a Contrastive Learning framework (MSACL) to enhance episode embedding learning by incorporating positive episodes from numerous correlated semantics. Extensive experiments on a real-world podcast recommendation dataset from a large audio streaming platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for user podcast exploration and cold-start episode recommendation.  ( 2 min )

The Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem describes how the singular subspaces of a matrix change when subjected to a small perturbation. This classic result is sharp in the worst case scenario. In this paper, we prove a stochastic version of the Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem when the perturbation is a Gaussian random matrix. Under certain structural assumptions, we obtain an optimal bound that significantly improves upon the classic Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem. One of our key tools is a new perturbation bound for the singular values, which may be of independent interest.  ( 2 min )

The paper proposes various strategies for sampling text data when performing automatic sentence classification for the purpose of detecting missing bibliographic links. We construct samples based on sentences as semantic units of the text and add their immediate context which consists of several neighboring sentences. We examine a number of sampling strategies that differ in context size and position. The experiment is carried out on the collection of STEM scientific papers. Including the context of sentences into samples improves the result of their classification. We automatically determine the optimal sampling strategy for a given text collection by implementing an ensemble voting when classifying the same data sampled in different ways. Sampling strategy taking into account the sentence context with hard voting procedure leads to the classification accuracy of 98% (F1-score). This method of detecting missing bibliographic links can be used in recommendation engines of applied intelligent information systems.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents an approach for learning Model Predictive Control (MPC) schemes directly from data using Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods. The state-of-the-art learning methods use RL to improve the performance of parameterized MPC schemes. However, these learning algorithms are often gradient-based methods that require frequent evaluations of computationally expensive MPC schemes, thereby restricting their use on big datasets. We propose to tackle this issue by using tools from RL to learn a parameterized MPC scheme directly from data in an offline fashion. Our approach derives an MPC scheme without having to solve it over the collected dataset, thereby eliminating the computational complexity of existing techniques for big data. We evaluate the proposed method on three simulated experiments of varying complexity.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a general mean-field game (GMFG) framework for simultaneous learning and decision-making in stochastic games with a large population. It first establishes the existence of a unique Nash Equilibrium to this GMFG, and demonstrates that naively combining reinforcement learning with the fixed-point approach in classical MFGs yields unstable algorithms. It then proposes value-based and policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms (GMF-V and GMF-P, respectively) with smoothed policies, with analysis of their convergence properties and computational complexities. Experiments on an equilibrium product pricing problem demonstrate that GMF-V-Q and GMF-P-TRPO, two specific instantiations of GMF-V and GMF-P, respectively, with Q-learning and TRPO, are both efficient and robust in the GMFG setting. Moreover, their performance is superior in convergence speed, accuracy, and stability when compared with existing algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning in the $N$-player setting.  ( 2 min )

Barlow Twins and VICReg are self-supervised representation learning models that use regularizers to decorrelate features. Although they work as well as conventional representation learning models, their training can be computationally demanding if the dimension of projected representations is high; as these regularizers are defined in terms of individual elements of a cross-correlation or covariance matrix, computing the loss for $d$-dimensional projected representations of $n$ samples takes $O(n d^2)$ time. In this paper, we propose a relaxed version of decorrelating regularizers that can be computed in $O(n d\log d)$ time by the fast Fourier transform. We also propose an inexpensive trick to mitigate the undesirable local minima that develop with the relaxation. Models learning representations using the proposed regularizers show comparable accuracy to existing models in downstream tasks, whereas the training requires less memory and is faster when $d$ is large.  ( 2 min )

Most crowdsourcing learning methods treat disagreement between annotators as noisy labelings while inter-disagreement among experts is often a good indicator for the ambiguity and uncertainty that is inherent in natural language. In this paper, we propose a framework called Learning Ambiguity from Crowd Sequential Annotations (LA-SCA) to explore the inter-disagreement between reliable annotators and effectively preserve confusing label information. First, a hierarchical Bayesian model is developed to infer ground-truth from crowds and group the annotators with similar reliability together. By modeling the relationship between the size of group the annotator involved in, the annotator's reliability and element's unambiguity in each sequence, inter-disagreement between reliable annotators on ambiguous elements is computed to obtain label confusing information that is incorporated to cost-sensitive sequence labeling. Experimental results on POS tagging and NER tasks show that our proposed framework achieves competitive performance in inferring ground-truth from crowds and predicting unknown sequences, and interpreting hierarchical clustering results helps discover labeling patterns of annotators with similar reliability.  ( 2 min )

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have become an important tool for understanding the physical world, but their advantages and limitations are not fully understood. Some QNNs with specific encoding methods can be efficiently simulated by classical surrogates, while others with quantum memory may perform better than classical classifiers. Here we systematically investigate the problem-dependent power of quantum neural classifiers (QCs) on multi-class classification tasks. Through the analysis of expected risk, a measure that weighs the training loss and the generalization error of a classifier jointly, we identify two key findings: first, the training loss dominates the power rather than the generalization ability; second, QCs undergo a U-shaped risk curve, in contrast to the double-descent risk curve of deep neural classifiers. We also reveal the intrinsic connection between optimal QCs and the Helstrom bound and the equiangular tight frame. Using these findings, we propose a method that uses loss dynamics to probe whether a QC may be more effective than a classical classifier on a particular learning task. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to explain the superiority of QCs over multilayer Perceptron on parity datasets and their limitations over convolutional neural networks on image datasets. Our work sheds light on the problem-dependent power of QNNs and offers a practical tool for evaluating their potential merit.  ( 2 min )

As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to impact many aspects of life and the global healthcare systems, the adoption of rapid and effective screening methods to prevent further spread of the virus and lessen the burden on healthcare providers is a necessity. As a cheap and widely accessible medical image modality, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) imaging allows radiologists to identify symptoms and assess severity through visual inspection of the chest ultrasound images. Combined with the recent advancements in computer science, applications of deep learning techniques in medical image analysis have shown promising results, demonstrating that artificial intelligence-based solutions can accelerate the diagnosis of COVID-19 and lower the burden on healthcare professionals. However, the lack of a huge amount of well-annotated data poses a challenge in building effective deep neural networks in the case of novel diseases and pandemics. Motivated by this, we present COVID-Net USPro, an explainable few-shot deep prototypical network, that monitors and detects COVID-19 positive cases with high precision and recall from minimal ultrasound images. COVID-Net USPro achieves 99.65% overall accuracy, 99.7% recall and 99.67% precision for COVID-19 positive cases when trained with only 5 shots. The analytic pipeline and results were verified by our contributing clinician with extensive experience in POCUS interpretation, ensuring that the network makes decisions based on actual patterns.  ( 2 min )

Historically, the analysis of stimulus-dependent time-frequency patterns has been the cornerstone of most electroencephalography (EEG) studies. The abnormal oscillations in high-frequency waves associated with psychotic disorders during sensory and cognitive tasks have been studied many times. However, any significant dissimilarity in the resting-state low-frequency bands is yet to be established. Spectral analysis of the alpha and delta band waves shows the effectiveness of stimulus-independent EEG in identifying the abnormal activity patterns of pathological brains. A generalized model incorporating multiple frequency bands should be more efficient in associating potential EEG biomarkers with First-Episode Psychosis (FEP), leading to an accurate diagnosis. We explore multiple machine-learning methods, including random-forest, support vector machine, and Gaussian Process Classifier (GPC), to demonstrate the practicality of resting-state Power Spectral Density (PSD) to distinguish patients of FEP from healthy controls. A comprehensive discussion of our preprocessing methods for PSD analysis and a detailed comparison of different models are included in this paper. The GPC model outperforms the other models with a specificity of 95.78% to show that PSD can be used as an effective feature extraction technique for analyzing and classifying resting-state EEG signals of psychiatric disorders.  ( 2 min )

Reverse engineering binaries is required to understand and analyse programs for which the source code is unavailable. Decompilers can transform the largely unreadable binaries into a more readable source code-like representation. However, reverse engineering is time-consuming, much of which is taken up by labelling the functions with semantic information. While the automated summarisation of decompiled code can help Reverse Engineers understand and analyse binaries, current work mainly focuses on summarising source code, and no suitable dataset exists for this task. In this work, we extend large pre-trained language models of source code to summarise decompiled binary functions. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of input and data properties on the performance of such models. Our approach consists of two main components; the data and the model. We first build CAPYBARA, a dataset of 214K decompiled function-documentation pairs across various compiler optimisations. We extend CAPYBARA further by generating synthetic datasets and deduplicating the data. Next, we fine-tune the CodeT5 base model with CAPYBARA to create BinT5. BinT5 achieves the state-of-the-art BLEU-4 score of 60.83, 58.82, and 44.21 for summarising source, decompiled, and synthetically stripped decompiled code, respectively. This indicates that these models can be extended to decompiled binaries successfully. Finally, we found that the performance of BinT5 is not heavily dependent on the dataset size and compiler optimisation level. We recommend future research to further investigate transferring knowledge when working with less expressive input formats such as stripped binaries.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning models are dominating almost all artificial intelligence tasks such as vision, text, and speech processing. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the main tool for training such models, where the computations are usually performed in single-precision floating-point number format. The convergence of single-precision SGD is normally aligned with the theoretical results of real numbers since they exhibit negligible error. However, the numerical error increases when the computations are performed in low-precision number formats. This provides compelling reasons to study the SGD convergence adapted for low-precision computations. We present both deterministic and stochastic analysis of the SGD algorithm, obtaining bounds that show the effect of number format. Such bounds can provide guidelines as to how SGD convergence is affected when constraints render the possibility of performing high-precision computations remote.  ( 2 min )

Mitigating the discrimination of machine learning models has gained increasing attention in medical image analysis. However, rare works focus on fair treatments for patients with multiple sensitive demographic ones, which is a crucial yet challenging problem for real-world clinical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method for fair representation learning with respect to multi-sensitive attributes. We pursue the independence between target and multi-sensitive representations by achieving orthogonality in the representation space. Concretely, we enforce the column space orthogonality by keeping target information on the complement of a low-rank sensitive space. Furthermore, in the row space, we encourage feature dimensions between target and sensitive representations to be orthogonal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with extensive experiments on the CheXpert dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to mitigate unfairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes in the field of medical imaging.  ( 2 min )

Due to its probabilistic nature, fault prognostics is a prime example of a use case for deep learning utilizing big data. However, the low availability of such data sets combined with the high effort of fitting, parameterizing and evaluating complex learning algorithms to the heterogenous and dynamic settings typical for industrial applications oftentimes prevents the practical application of this approach. Automatic adaptation to new or dynamically changing fault prognostics scenarios can be achieved using transfer learning or continual learning methods. In this paper, a first survey of such approaches is carried out, aiming at establishing best practices for future research in this field. It is shown that the field is lacking common benchmarks to robustly compare results and facilitate scientific progress. Therefore, the data sets utilized in these publications are surveyed as well in order to identify suitable candidates for such benchmark scenarios.  ( 2 min )

In this letter, we propose a model identification method via hyperparameter optimization (MIHO). Our method is able to identify the parameters of the parametric models in a data-driven manner. We utilize MIHO for the dynamics parameters of the AV-21, the full-scaled autonomous race vehicle, and integrate them into our model-based planning and control systems. In experiments, the models with the optimized parameters demonstrate the generalization ability of the vehicle dynamics model. We further conduct extensive field tests to validate our model-based system. The tests show that our race systems leverage the learned model dynamics well and successfully perform obstacle avoidance and high-speed driving over $200 km/h$ at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The source code for MIHO and videos of the tests are available at https://github.com/hynkis/MIHO.  ( 2 min )

There is a recent trend to leverage the power of graph neural networks (GNNs) for brain-network based psychiatric diagnosis, which,in turn, also motivates an urgent need for psychiatrists to fully understand the decision behavior of the used GNNs. However, most of the existing GNN explainers are either post-hoc in which another interpretive model needs to be created to explain a well-trained GNN, or do not consider the causal relationship between the extracted explanation and the decision, such that the explanation itself contains spurious correlations and suffers from weak faithfulness. In this work, we propose a granger causality-inspired graph neural network (CI-GNN), a built-in interpretable model that is able to identify the most influential subgraph (i.e., functional connectivity within brain regions) that is causally related to the decision (e.g., major depressive disorder patients or healthy controls), without the training of an auxillary interpretive network. CI-GNN learns disentangled subgraph-level representations {\alpha} and \b{eta} that encode, respectively, the causal and noncausal aspects of original graph under a graph variational autoencoder framework, regularized by a conditional mutual information (CMI) constraint. We theoretically justify the validity of the CMI regulation in capturing the causal relationship. We also empirically evaluate the performance of CI-GNN against three baseline GNNs and four state-of-the-art GNN explainers on synthetic data and two large-scale brain disease datasets. We observe that CI-GNN achieves the best performance in a wide range of metrics and provides more reliable and concise explanations which have clinical evidence.  ( 2 min )

The global COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than six million deaths worldwide. Medicalized hotels were established in Taiwan as quarantine facilities for COVID-19 patients with no or mild symptoms. Due to limited medical care available at these hotels, it is of paramount importance to identify patients at risk of clinical deterioration. This study aimed to develop and evaluate a graph-based deep learning approach for progressive hospital transfer risk prediction in a medicalized hotel setting. Vital sign measurements were obtained for 632 patients and daily patient similarity graphs were constructed. Inductive graph convolutional network models were trained on top of the temporally integrated graphs to predict hospital transfer risk. The proposed models achieved AUC scores above 0.83 for hospital transfer risk prediction based on the measurements of past 1, 2, and 3 days, outperforming baseline machine learning methods. A post-hoc analysis on the constructed diffusion-based graph using Local Clustering Coefficient discovered a high-risk cluster with significantly older mean age, higher body temperature, lower SpO2, and shorter length of stay. Further time-to-hospital-transfer survival analysis also revealed a significant decrease in survival probability in the discovered high-risk cluster. The obtained results demonstrated promising predictability and interpretability of the proposed graph-based approach. This technique may help preemptively detect high-risk patients at community-based medical facilities similar to a medicalized hotel.  ( 2 min )

Multi-task learning aims to boost the generalization performance of multiple related tasks simultaneously by leveraging information contained in those tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning framework, where we utilize prior knowledge about the relations between features. We also impose a penalty on the coefficients changing for each specific feature to ensure related tasks have similar coefficients on common features shared among them. In addition, we capture a common set of features via group sparsity. The objective is formulated as a non-smooth convex optimization problem, which can be solved with various methods, including gradient descent method with fixed stepsize, iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (ISTA) with back-tracking, and its variation -- fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA). In light of the sub-linear convergence rate of the methods aforementioned, we propose an asymptotically linear convergent algorithm with theoretical guarantee. Empirical experiments on both regression and classification tasks with real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithms are capable of improving the generalization performance of multiple related tasks.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we study the problem of MOOC quality evaluation which is essential for improving the course materials, promoting students' learning efficiency, and benefiting user services. While achieving promising performances, current works still suffer from the complicated interactions and relationships of entities in MOOC platforms. To tackle the challenges, we formulate the problem as a course representation learning task-based and develop an Information-aware Graph Representation Learning(IaGRL) for multi-view MOOC quality evaluation. Specifically, We first build a MOOC Heterogeneous Network (HIN) to represent the interactions and relationships among entities in MOOC platforms. And then we decompose the MOOC HIN into multiple single-relation graphs based on meta-paths to depict the multi-view semantics of courses. The course representation learning can be further converted to a multi-view graph representation task. Different from traditional graph representation learning, the learned course representations are expected to match the following three types of validity: (1) the agreement on expressiveness between the raw course portfolio and the learned course representations; (2) the consistency between the representations in each view and the unified representations; (3) the alignment between the course and MOOC platform representations. Therefore, we propose to exploit mutual information for preserving the validity of course representations. We conduct extensive experiments over real-world MOOC datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.  ( 2 min )

Recent studies on knowledge graphs (KGs) show that path-based methods empowered by pre-trained language models perform well in the provision of inductive and explainable relation predictions. In this paper, we introduce the concepts of relation path coverage and relation path confidence to filter out unreliable paths prior to model training to elevate the model performance. Moreover, we propose Knowledge Reasoning Sentence Transformer (KRST) to predict inductive relations in KGs. KRST is designed to encode the extracted reliable paths in KGs, allowing us to properly cluster paths and provide multi-aspect explanations. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that compared to SOTA models, KRST achieves the best performance in most transductive and inductive test cases (4 of 6), and in 11 of 12 few-shot test cases.  ( 2 min )

Metaverse is expected to create a virtual world closely connected with reality to provide users with immersive experience with the support of 5G high data rate communication technique. A huge amount of data in physical world needs to be synchronized to the virtual world to provide immersive experience for users, and there will be higher requirements on coverage to include more users into Metaverse. However, 5G signal suffers severe attenuation, which makes it more expensive to maintain the same coverage. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a promising candidate technique for future implementation of Metaverse as a low-cost and high-mobility platform for communication devices. In this paper, we propose a proximal policy optimization (PPO) based double-agent cooperative reinforcement learning method for channel allocation and trajectory control of UAV to collect and synchronize data from the physical world to the virtual world, and expand the coverage of Metaverse services economically. Simulation results show that our proposed method is able to achieve better performance compared to the benchmark approaches.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning (FL) is an effective solution to train machine learning models on the increasing amount of data generated by IoT devices and smartphones while keeping such data localized. Most previous work on federated learning assumes that clients operate on static datasets collected before training starts. This approach may be inefficient because 1) it ignores new samples clients collect during training, and 2) it may require a potentially long preparatory phase for clients to collect enough data. Moreover, learning on static datasets may be simply impossible in scenarios with small aggregate storage across devices. It is, therefore, necessary to design federated algorithms able to learn from data streams. In this work, we formulate and study the problem of \emph{federated learning for data streams}. We propose a general FL algorithm to learn from data streams through an opportune weighted empirical risk minimization. Our theoretical analysis provides insights to configure such an algorithm, and we evaluate its performance on a wide range of machine learning tasks.  ( 2 min )

Counterfactual explanations are an emerging tool to enhance interpretability of deep learning models. Given a sample, these methods seek to find and display to the user similar samples across the decision boundary. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial counterfactual approach for satellite image time series in a multi-class setting for the land cover classification task. One of the distinctive features of the proposed approach is the lack of prior assumption on the targeted class for a given counterfactual explanation. This inherent flexibility allows for the discovery of interesting information on the relationship between land cover classes. The other feature consists of encouraging the counterfactual to differ from the original sample only in a small and compact temporal segment. These time-contiguous perturbations allow for a much sparser and, thus, interpretable solution. Furthermore, plausibility/realism of the generated counterfactual explanations is enforced via the proposed adversarial learning strategy.  ( 2 min )

$\mathrm{\gamma}$-ray spectroscopy is a quantitative, non-destructive technique that may be utilized for the identification and quantitative isotopic estimation of radionuclides. Traditional methods of isotopic determination have various challenges that contribute to statistical and systematic uncertainties in the estimated isotopics. Furthermore, these methods typically require numerous pre-processing steps, and have only been rigorously tested in laboratory settings with limited shielding. In this work, we examine the application of a number of machine learning based regression algorithms as alternatives to conventional approaches for analyzing $\mathrm{\gamma}$-ray spectroscopy data in the Emergency Response arena. This approach not only eliminates many steps in the analysis procedure, and therefore offers potential to reduce this source of systematic uncertainty, but is also shown to offer comparable performance to conventional approaches in the Emergency Response Application.  ( 2 min )

Learning from noisy labels plays an important role in the deep learning era. Despite numerous studies with promising results, identifying clean labels from a noisily-annotated dataset is still challenging since the conventional noisy label learning problem with single noisy label per instance is not identifiable, i.e., it does not theoretically have a unique solution unless one has access to clean labels or introduces additional assumptions. This paper aims to formally investigate such identifiability issue by formulating the noisy label learning problem as a multinomial mixture model, enabling the formulation of the identifiability constraint. In particular, we prove that the noisy label learning problem is identifiable if there are at least $2C - 1$ noisy labels per instance provided, with $C$ being the number of classes. In light of such requirement, we propose a method that automatically generates additional noisy labels per training sample by estimating the noisy label distribution based on nearest neighbours. Such additional noisy labels allow us to apply the Expectation - Maximisation algorithm to estimate the posterior of clean labels. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of estimating clean labels without any heuristics in several challenging label noise benchmarks, including synthetic, web-controlled and real-world label noises, but also of performing competitively with many state-of-the-art methods.  ( 2 min )

We study kernel methods in machine learning from the perspective of feature subspace. We establish a one-to-one correspondence between feature subspaces and kernels and propose an information-theoretic measure for kernels. In particular, we construct a kernel from Hirschfeld--Gebelein--R\'{e}nyi maximal correlation functions, coined the maximal correlation kernel, and demonstrate its information-theoretic optimality. We use the support vector machine (SVM) as an example to illustrate a connection between kernel methods and feature extraction approaches. We show that the kernel SVM on maximal correlation kernel achieves minimum prediction error. Finally, we interpret the Fisher kernel as a special maximal correlation kernel and establish its optimality.  ( 2 min )

In this work, we propose a generalization of the forward-forward (FF) algorithm that we call the predictive forward-forward (PFF) algorithm. Specifically, we design a dynamic, recurrent neural system that learns a directed generative circuit jointly and simultaneously with a representation circuit, combining elements of predictive coding, an emerging and viable neurobiological process theory of cortical function, with the forward-forward adaptation scheme. Furthermore, PFF efficiently learns to propagate learning signals and updates synapses with forward passes only, eliminating some of the key structural and computational constraints imposed by a backprop-based scheme. Besides computational advantages, the PFF process could be further useful for understanding the learning mechanisms behind biological neurons that make use of local (and global) signals despite missing feedback connections. We run several experiments on image data and demonstrate that the PFF procedure works as well as backprop, offering a promising brain-inspired algorithm for classifying, reconstructing, and synthesizing data patterns. As a result, our approach presents further evidence of the promise afforded by backprop-alternative credit assignment algorithms within the context of brain-inspired computing.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we study the online learning of real-valued functions where the hidden function is known to have certain smoothness properties. Specifically, for $q \ge 1$, let $\mathcal F_q$ be the class of absolutely continuous functions $f: [0,1] \to \mathbb R$ such that $\|f'\|_q \le 1$. For $q \ge 1$ and $d \in \mathbb Z^+$, let $\mathcal F_{q,d}$ be the class of functions $f: [0,1]^d \to \mathbb R$ such that any function $g: [0,1] \to \mathbb R$ formed by fixing all but one parameter of $f$ is in $\mathcal F_q$. For any class of real-valued functions $\mathcal F$ and $p>0$, let $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F)$ be the best upper bound on the sum of $p^{\text{th}}$ powers of absolute prediction errors that a learner can guarantee in the worst case. In the single-variable setup, we find new bounds for $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)$ that are sharp up to a constant factor. We show for all $\varepsilon \in (0, 1)$ that $\text{opt}_{1+\varepsilon}(\mathcal{F}_{\infty}) = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ and $\text{opt}_{1+\varepsilon}(\mathcal{F}_q) = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ for all $q \ge 2$. We also show for $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$ that $\text{opt}_2(\mathcal F_{1+\varepsilon})=\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1})$. In addition, we obtain new exact results by proving that $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)=1$ for $q \in (1,2)$ and $p \ge 2+\frac{1}{q-1}$. In the multi-variable setup, we establish inequalities relating $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_{q,d})$ to $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)$ and show that $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_{\infty,d})$ is infinite when $pd$. We also obtain sharp bounds on learning $\mathcal F_{\infty,d}$ for $p < d$ when the number of trials is bounded.  ( 2 min )

DAgger is an imitation algorithm that aggregates its original datasets by querying the expert on all samples encountered during training. In order to reduce the number of samples queried, we propose a modification to DAgger, known as DADAgger, which only queries the expert for state-action pairs that are out of distribution (OOD). OOD states are identified by measuring the variance of the action predictions of an ensemble of models on each state, which we simulate using dropout. Testing on the Car Racing and Half Cheetah environments achieves comparable performance to DAgger but with reduced expert queries, and better performance than a random sampling baseline. We also show that our algorithm may be used to build efficient, well-balanced training datasets by running with no initial data and only querying the expert to resolve uncertainty.  ( 2 min )

Determination of mispronunciations and ensuring feedback to users are maintained by computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. In this work, we introduce an ensemble model that defines the mispronunciation of Arabic phonemes and assists learning of Arabic, effectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first attempt to determine the mispronunciations of Arabic phonemes employing ensemble learning techniques and conventional machine learning models, comprehensively. In order to observe the effect of feature extraction techniques, mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC), and Mel spectrogram are blended with each learning algorithm. To show the success of proposed model, 29 letters in the Arabic phonemes, 8 of which are hafiz, are voiced by a total of 11 different person. The amount of data set has been enhanced employing the methods of adding noise, time shifting, time stretching, pitch shifting. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the utilization of voting classifier as an ensemble algorithm with Mel spectrogram feature extraction technique exhibits remarkable classification result with 95.9% of accuracy.  ( 2 min )

Developing meta-learning algorithms that are un-biased toward a subset of training tasks often requires hand-designed criteria to weight tasks, potentially resulting in sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we introduce a new principled and fully-automated task-weighting algorithm for meta-learning methods. By considering the weights of tasks within the same mini-batch as an action, and the meta-parameter of interest as the system state, we cast the task-weighting meta-learning problem to a trajectory optimisation and employ the iterative linear quadratic regulator to determine the optimal action or weights of tasks. We theoretically show that the proposed algorithm converges to an $\epsilon_{0}$-stationary point, and empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach out-performs common hand-engineering weighting methods in two few-shot learning benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

Automatic segmentation of brain MR images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is critical for tissue volumetric analysis and cortical surface reconstruction. Due to dramatic structural and appearance changes associated with developmental and aging processes, existing brain tissue segmentation methods are only viable for specific age groups. Consequently, methods developed for one age group may fail for another. In this paper, we make the first attempt to segment brain tissues across the entire human lifespan (0-100 years of age) using a unified deep learning model. To overcome the challenges related to structural variability underpinned by biological processes, intensity inhomogeneity, motion artifacts, scanner-induced differences, and acquisition protocols, we propose to use contrastive learning to improve the quality of feature representations in a latent space for effective lifespan tissue segmentation. We compared our approach with commonly used segmentation methods on a large-scale dataset of 2,464 MR images. Experimental results show that our model accurately segments brain tissues across the lifespan and outperforms existing methods.  ( 2 min )

The TESS mission produces a large amount of time series data, only a small fraction of which contain detectable exoplanetary transit signals. Deep learning techniques such as neural networks have proved effective at differentiating promising astrophysical eclipsing candidates from other phenomena such as stellar variability and systematic instrumental effects in an efficient, unbiased and sustainable manner. This paper presents a high quality dataset containing light curves from the Primary Mission and 1st Extended Mission full frame images and periodic signals detected via Box Least Squares (Kov\'acs et al. 2002; Hartman 2012). The dataset was curated using a thorough manual review process then used to train a neural network called Astronet-Triage-v2. On our test set, for transiting/eclipsing events we achieve a 99.6% recall (true positives over all data with positive labels) at a precision of 75.7% (true positives over all predicted positives). Since 90% of our training data is from the Primary Mission, we also test our ability to generalize on held-out 1st Extended Mission data. Here, we find an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.965, a 4% improvement over Astronet-Triage (Yu et al. 2019). On the TESS Object of Interest (TOI) Catalog through April 2022, a shortlist of planets and planet candidates, Astronet-Triage-v2 is able to recover 3577 out of 4140 TOIs, while Astronet-Triage only recovers 3349 targets at an equal level of precision. In other words, upgrading to Astronet-Triage-v2 helps save at least 200 planet candidates from being lost. The new model is currently used for planet candidate triage in the Quick-Look Pipeline (Huang et al. 2020a,b; Kunimoto et al. 2021).  ( 3 min )

Federated learning has emerged as an effective paradigm to achieve privacy-preserving collaborative learning among different parties. Compared to traditional centralized learning that requires collecting data from each party, in federated learning, only the locally trained models or computed gradients are exchanged, without exposing any data information. As a result, it is able to protect privacy to some extent. In recent years, federated learning has become more and more prevalent and there have been many surveys for summarizing related methods in this hot research topic. However, most of them focus on a specific perspective or lack the latest research progress. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey on federated learning, aiming to review the recent advanced federated methods and applications from different aspects. Specifically, this paper includes four major contributions. First, we present a new taxonomy of federated learning in terms of the pipeline and challenges in federated scenarios. Second, we summarize federated learning methods into several categories and briefly introduce the state-of-the-art methods under these categories. Third, we overview some prevalent federated learning frameworks and introduce their features. Finally, some potential deficiencies of current methods and several future directions are discussed.  ( 2 min )

With the rapid development of deep learning models and hardware support for dense computing, the deep learning (DL) workload characteristics changed significantly from a few hot spots on compute-intensive operations to a broad range of operations scattered across the models. Accelerating a few compute-intensive operations using the expert-tuned implementation of primitives does not fully exploit the performance potential of AI hardware. Various efforts are made to compile a full deep neural network (DNN) graph. One of the biggest challenges is to achieve end-to-end compilation by generating expert-level performance code for the dense compute-intensive operations and applying compilation optimization at the scope of DNN computation graph across multiple compute-intensive operations. We present oneDNN Graph Compiler, a tensor compiler that employs a hybrid approach of using techniques from both compiler optimization and expert-tuned kernels for high-performance code generation of the deep neural network graph. oneDNN Graph Compiler addresses unique optimization challenges in the deep learning domain, such as low-precision computation, aggressive fusion, optimization for static tensor shapes and memory layout, constant weight optimization, and memory buffer reuse. Experimental results demonstrate up to 2x performance gains over primitives-based optimization for performance-critical DNN computation graph patterns on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.  ( 2 min )

(Conditional) Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have found great success in recent years, due to their ability to approximate (conditional) distributions over extremely high dimensional spaces. However, they are highly unstable and computationally expensive to train, especially in the time series setting. Recently, it has been proposed the use of a key object in rough path theory, called the signature of a path, which is able to convert the min-max formulation given by the (conditional) GAN framework into a classical minimization problem. However, this method is extremely expensive in terms of memory cost, sometimes even becoming prohibitive. To overcome this, we propose the use of \textit{Conditional Neural Stochastic Differential Equations}, which have a constant memory cost as a function of depth, being more memory efficient than traditional deep learning architectures. We empirically test that this proposed model is more efficient than other classical approaches, both in terms of memory cost and computational time, and that it usually outperforms them in terms of performance.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great potential, but is currently full of overhyping and pipe dreams. We point to some difficulties with current research which we feel are endemic to the direction taken by the community. To us, the current direction is not likely to lead to "deployable" RL: RL that works in practice and can work in practical situations yet still is economically viable. We also propose a potential fix to some of the difficulties of the field.  ( 2 min )

Offline reinforcement learning learns an effective policy on offline datasets without online interaction, and it attracts persistent research attention due to its potential of practical application. However, extrapolation error generated by distribution shift will still lead to the overestimation for those actions that transit to out-of-distribution(OOD) states, which degrades the reliability and robustness of the offline policy. In this paper, we propose Contextual Conservative Q-Learning(C-CQL) to learn a robustly reliable policy through the contextual information captured via an inverse dynamics model. With the supervision of the inverse dynamics model, it tends to learn a policy that generates stable transition at perturbed states, for the fact that pertuebed states are a common kind of OOD states. In this manner, we enable the learnt policy more likely to generate transition that destines to the empirical next state distributions of the offline dataset, i.e., robustly reliable transition. Besides, we theoretically reveal that C-CQL is the generalization of the Conservative Q-Learning(CQL) and aggressive State Deviation Correction(SDC). Finally, experimental results demonstrate the proposed C-CQL achieves the state-of-the-art performance in most environments of offline Mujoco suite and a noisy Mujoco setting.  ( 2 min )

Gradient tracking (GT) is an algorithm designed for solving decentralized optimization problems over a network (such as training a machine learning model). A key feature of GT is a tracking mechanism that allows to overcome data heterogeneity between nodes. We develop a novel decentralized tracking mechanism, $K$-GT, that enables communication-efficient local updates in GT while inheriting the data-independence property of GT. We prove a convergence rate for $K$-GT on smooth non-convex functions and prove that it reduces the communication overhead asymptotically by a linear factor $K$, where $K$ denotes the number of local steps. We illustrate the robustness and effectiveness of this heterogeneity correction on convex and non-convex benchmark problems and on a non-convex neural network training task with the MNIST dataset.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we show how specific families of positive definite kernels serve as powerful tools in analyses of iteration algorithms for multiple layer feedforward Neural Network models. Our focus is on particular kernels that adapt well to learning algorithms for data-sets/features which display intrinsic self-similarities at feedforward iterations of scaling.  ( 2 min )

We study sample efficient reinforcement learning (RL) under the general framework of interactive decision making, which includes Markov decision process (MDP), partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and predictive state representation (PSR) as special cases. Toward finding the minimum assumption that empowers sample efficient learning, we propose a novel complexity measure, generalized eluder coefficient (GEC), which characterizes the fundamental tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in online interactive decision making. In specific, GEC captures the hardness of exploration by comparing the error of predicting the performance of the updated policy with the in-sample training error evaluated on the historical data. We show that RL problems with low GEC form a remarkably rich class, which subsumes low Bellman eluder dimension problems, bilinear class, low witness rank problems, PO-bilinear class, and generalized regular PSR, where generalized regular PSR, a new tractable PSR class identified by us, includes nearly all known tractable POMDPs and PSRs. Furthermore, in terms of algorithm design, we propose a generic posterior sampling algorithm, which can be implemented in both model-free and model-based fashion, under both fully observable and partially observable settings. The proposed algorithm modifies the standard posterior sampling algorithm in two aspects: (i) we use an optimistic prior distribution that biases towards hypotheses with higher values and (ii) a loglikelihood function is set to be the empirical loss evaluated on the historical data, where the choice of loss function supports both model-free and model-based learning. We prove that the proposed algorithm is sample efficient by establishing a sublinear regret upper bound in terms of GEC. In summary, we provide a new and unified understanding of both fully observable and partially observable RL.  ( 3 min )

We study the best-arm identification (BAI) problem with a fixed budget and contextual (covariate) information. In each round of an adaptive experiment, after observing contextual information, we choose a treatment arm using past observations and current context. Our goal is to identify the best treatment arm, which is a treatment arm with the maximal expected reward marginalized over the contextual distribution, with a minimal probability of misidentification. In this study, we consider a class of nonparametric bandit models that converge to location-shift models when the gaps go to zero. First, we derive lower bounds of the misidentification probability for a certain class of strategies and bandit models (probabilistic models of potential outcomes) under a small-gap regime. A small-gap regime is a situation where gaps of the expected rewards between the best and suboptimal treatment arms go to zero, which corresponds to one of the worst cases in identifying the best treatment arm. We then develop the ``Random Sampling (RS)-Augmented Inverse Probability weighting (AIPW) strategy,'' which is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the probability of misidentification under the strategy matches the lower bound when the budget goes to infinity in the small-gap regime. The RS-AIPW strategy consists of the RS rule tracking a target sample allocation ratio and the recommendation rule using the AIPW estimator.  ( 2 min )

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm is determined by several, possibly conflicting attributes. The aim is to optimize a 'primary' attribute subject to user-provided constraints on other 'secondary' attributes. We assume that the attributes can be estimated using samples from the arms' distributions, and that the estimators enjoy suitable concentration properties. We propose an algorithm called Con-LCB that guarantees a logarithmic regret, i.e., the average number of plays of all non-optimal arms is at most logarithmic in the horizon. The algorithm also outputs a Boolean flag that correctly identifies, with high probability, whether the given instance is feasible/infeasible with respect to the constraints. We also show that Con-LCB is optimal within a universal constant, i.e., that more sophisticated algorithms cannot do much better universally. Finally, we establish a fundamental trade-off between regret minimization and feasibility identification. Our framework finds natural applications, for instance, in financial portfolio optimization, where risk constrained maximization of expected return is meaningful.  ( 2 min )

Data augmentation (DA) is a powerful workhorse for bolstering performance in modern machine learning. Specific augmentations like translations and scaling in computer vision are traditionally believed to improve generalization by generating new (artificial) data from the same distribution. However, this traditional viewpoint does not explain the success of prevalent augmentations in modern machine learning (e.g. randomized masking, cutout, mixup), that greatly alter the training data distribution. In this work, we develop a new theoretical framework to characterize the impact of a general class of DA on underparameterized and overparameterized linear model generalization. Our framework reveals that DA induces implicit spectral regularization through a combination of two distinct effects: a) manipulating the relative proportion of eigenvalues of the data covariance matrix in a training-data-dependent manner, and b) uniformly boosting the entire spectrum of the data covariance matrix through ridge regression. These effects, when applied to popular augmentations, give rise to a wide variety of phenomena, including discrepancies in generalization between over-parameterized and under-parameterized regimes and differences between regression and classification tasks. Our framework highlights the nuanced and sometimes surprising impacts of DA on generalization, and serves as a testbed for novel augmentation design.  ( 2 min )

Confidence intervals based on the central limit theorem (CLT) are a cornerstone of classical statistics. Despite being only asymptotically valid, they are ubiquitous because they permit statistical inference under very weak assumptions, and can often be applied to problems even when nonasymptotic inference is impossible. This paper introduces time-uniform analogues of such asymptotic confidence intervals. To elaborate, our methods take the form of confidence sequences (CS) -- sequences of confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over time. CSs provide valid inference at arbitrary stopping times, incurring no penalties for "peeking" at the data, unlike classical confidence intervals which require the sample size to be fixed in advance. Existing CSs in the literature are nonasymptotic, and hence do not enjoy the aforementioned broad applicability of asymptotic confidence intervals. Our work bridges the gap by giving a definition for "asymptotic CSs", and deriving a universal asymptotic CS that requires only weak CLT-like assumptions. While the CLT approximates the distribution of a sample average by that of a Gaussian at a fixed sample size, we use strong invariance principles (stemming from the seminal 1970s work of Komlos, Major, and Tusnady) to uniformly approximate the entire sample average process by an implicit Gaussian process. We demonstrate their utility by deriving nonparametric asymptotic CSs for the average treatment effect based on doubly robust estimators in observational studies, for which no nonasymptotic methods can exist even in the fixed-time regime (due to confounding bias). These enable doubly robust causal inference that can be continuously monitored and adaptively stopped.  ( 3 min )

In this work, minibatch MCMC sampling for feedforward neural networks is made more feasible. To this end, it is proposed to sample subgroups of parameters via a blocked Gibbs sampling scheme. By partitioning the parameter space, sampling is possible irrespective of layer width. It is also possible to alleviate vanishing acceptance rates for increasing depth by reducing the proposal variance in deeper layers. Increasing the length of a non-convergent chain increases the predictive accuracy in classification tasks, so avoiding vanishing acceptance rates and consequently enabling longer chain runs have practical benefits. Moreover, non-convergent chain realizations aid in the quantification of predictive uncertainty. An open problem is how to perform minibatch MCMC sampling for feedforward neural networks in the presence of augmented data.  ( 2 min )

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a computational perspective. Currently, only moment-based methods enjoy theoretical guarantees while likelihood-based methods are dominated by heuristics such as Expectation-Maximization that are known to fail in simple examples. In this work, we propose a new algorithm to compute the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) in a Gaussian mixture model. Our method is based on gradient descent over the space of probability measures equipped with the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao geometry for which we establish convergence guarantees. In practice, it can be approximated using an interacting particle system where the weight and location of particles are updated alternately. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared not only to classical benchmarks but also to similar gradient descent algorithms with respect to simpler geometries. In particular, these simulations illustrate the benefit of updating both weight and location of the interacting particles.  ( 2 min )

There is a recent trend to leverage the power of graph neural networks (GNNs) for brain-network based psychiatric diagnosis, which,in turn, also motivates an urgent need for psychiatrists to fully understand the decision behavior of the used GNNs. However, most of the existing GNN explainers are either post-hoc in which another interpretive model needs to be created to explain a well-trained GNN, or do not consider the causal relationship between the extracted explanation and the decision, such that the explanation itself contains spurious correlations and suffers from weak faithfulness. In this work, we propose a granger causality-inspired graph neural network (CI-GNN), a built-in interpretable model that is able to identify the most influential subgraph (i.e., functional connectivity within brain regions) that is causally related to the decision (e.g., major depressive disorder patients or healthy controls), without the training of an auxillary interpretive network. CI-GNN learns disentangled subgraph-level representations {\alpha} and \b{eta} that encode, respectively, the causal and noncausal aspects of original graph under a graph variational autoencoder framework, regularized by a conditional mutual information (CMI) constraint. We theoretically justify the validity of the CMI regulation in capturing the causal relationship. We also empirically evaluate the performance of CI-GNN against three baseline GNNs and four state-of-the-art GNN explainers on synthetic data and two large-scale brain disease datasets. We observe that CI-GNN achieves the best performance in a wide range of metrics and provides more reliable and concise explanations which have clinical evidence.  ( 2 min )

Volt/VAR control rules facilitate the autonomous operation of distributed energy resources (DER) to regulate voltage in power distribution grids. According to non-incremental control rules, such as the one mandated by the IEEE Standard 1547, the reactive power setpoint of each DER is computed as a piecewise-linear curve of the local voltage. However, the slopes of such curves are upper-bounded to ensure stability. On the other hand, incremental rules add a memory term into the setpoint update, rendering them universally stable. They can thus attain enhanced steady-state voltage profiles. Optimal rule design (ORD) for incremental rules can be formulated as a bilevel program. We put forth a scalable solution by reformulating ORD as training a deep neural network (DNN). This DNN emulates the Volt/VAR dynamics for incremental rules derived as iterations of proximal gradient descent (PGD). Analytical findings and numerical tests corroborate that the proposed ORD solution can be neatly adapted to single/multi-phase feeders.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning methods have gained popularity in recent years through the media and the relative ease of implementation through open source packages such as Keras. We investigate the applicability of popular recurrent neural networks in forecasting call center volumes at a large financial services company. These series are highly complex with seasonal patterns - between hours of the day, day of the week, and time of the year - in addition to autocorrelation between individual observations. Though we investigate the financial services industry, the recommendations for modeling cyclical nonlinear behavior generalize across all sectors. We explore the optimization of parameter settings and convergence criteria for Elman (simple), Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) RNNs from a practical point of view. A designed experiment using actual call center data across many different "skills" (income call streams) compares performance measured by validation error rates of the best observed RNN configurations against other modern and classical forecasting techniques. We summarize the utility of and considerations required for using deep learning methods in forecasting.  ( 2 min )

There is a recent and growing literature on large-width asymptotic properties of Gaussian neural networks (NNs), namely NNs whose weights are initialized as Gaussian distributions. Two popular problems are: i) the study of the large-width distributions of NNs, which characterizes the infinitely wide limit of a rescaled NN in terms of a Gaussian stochastic process; ii) the study of the large-width training dynamics of NNs, which characterizes the infinitely wide dynamics in terms of a deterministic kernel, referred to as the neural tangent kernel (NTK), and shows that, for a sufficiently large width, the gradient descent achieves zero training error at a linear rate. In this paper, we consider these problems for $\alpha$-Stable NNs, namely NNs whose weights are initialized as $\alpha$-Stable distributions with $\alpha\in(0,2]$. First, for $\alpha$-Stable NNs with a ReLU activation function, we show that if the NN's width goes to infinity then a rescaled NN converges weakly to an $\alpha$-Stable stochastic process. As a difference with respect to the Gaussian setting, our result shows that the choice of the activation function affects the scaling of the NN, that is: to achieve the infinitely wide $\alpha$-Stable process, the ReLU activation requires an additional logarithmic term in the scaling with respect to sub-linear activations. Then, we study the large-width training dynamics of $\alpha$-Stable ReLU-NNs, characterizing the infinitely wide dynamics in terms of a random kernel, referred to as the $\alpha$-Stable NTK, and showing that, for a sufficiently large width, the gradient descent achieves zero training error at a linear rate. The randomness of the $\alpha$-Stable NTK is a further difference with respect to the Gaussian setting, that is: within the $\alpha$-Stable setting, the randomness of the NN at initialization does not vanish in the large-width regime of the training.  ( 3 min )

Counterfactual explanations are an emerging tool to enhance interpretability of deep learning models. Given a sample, these methods seek to find and display to the user similar samples across the decision boundary. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial counterfactual approach for satellite image time series in a multi-class setting for the land cover classification task. One of the distinctive features of the proposed approach is the lack of prior assumption on the targeted class for a given counterfactual explanation. This inherent flexibility allows for the discovery of interesting information on the relationship between land cover classes. The other feature consists of encouraging the counterfactual to differ from the original sample only in a small and compact temporal segment. These time-contiguous perturbations allow for a much sparser and, thus, interpretable solution. Furthermore, plausibility/realism of the generated counterfactual explanations is enforced via the proposed adversarial learning strategy.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a general mean-field game (GMFG) framework for simultaneous learning and decision-making in stochastic games with a large population. It first establishes the existence of a unique Nash Equilibrium to this GMFG, and demonstrates that naively combining reinforcement learning with the fixed-point approach in classical MFGs yields unstable algorithms. It then proposes value-based and policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms (GMF-V and GMF-P, respectively) with smoothed policies, with analysis of their convergence properties and computational complexities. Experiments on an equilibrium product pricing problem demonstrate that GMF-V-Q and GMF-P-TRPO, two specific instantiations of GMF-V and GMF-P, respectively, with Q-learning and TRPO, are both efficient and robust in the GMFG setting. Moreover, their performance is superior in convergence speed, accuracy, and stability when compared with existing algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning in the $N$-player setting.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning (FL) is an effective solution to train machine learning models on the increasing amount of data generated by IoT devices and smartphones while keeping such data localized. Most previous work on federated learning assumes that clients operate on static datasets collected before training starts. This approach may be inefficient because 1) it ignores new samples clients collect during training, and 2) it may require a potentially long preparatory phase for clients to collect enough data. Moreover, learning on static datasets may be simply impossible in scenarios with small aggregate storage across devices. It is, therefore, necessary to design federated algorithms able to learn from data streams. In this work, we formulate and study the problem of \emph{federated learning for data streams}. We propose a general FL algorithm to learn from data streams through an opportune weighted empirical risk minimization. Our theoretical analysis provides insights to configure such an algorithm, and we evaluate its performance on a wide range of machine learning tasks.  ( 2 min )

The Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem describes how the singular subspaces of a matrix change when subjected to a small perturbation. This classic result is sharp in the worst case scenario. In this paper, we prove a stochastic version of the Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem when the perturbation is a Gaussian random matrix. Under certain structural assumptions, we obtain an optimal bound that significantly improves upon the classic Davis--Kahan--Wedin $\sin \Theta$ theorem. One of our key tools is a new perturbation bound for the singular values, which may be of independent interest.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we study a class of unconstrained and constrained bilevel optimization problems in which the lower-level part is a convex optimization problem, while the upper-level part is possibly a nonconvex optimization problem. In particular, we propose penalty methods for solving them, whose subproblems turn out to be a structured minimax problem and are suitably solved by a first-order method developed in this paper. Under some suitable assumptions, an \emph{operation complexity} of ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-4}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$ and ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-7}\log\varepsilon^{-1})$, measured by their fundamental operations, is established for the proposed penalty methods for finding an $\varepsilon$-KKT solution of the unconstrained and constrained bilevel optimization problems, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, the methodology and results in this paper are new.  ( 2 min )

We investigate gradient descent training of wide neural networks and the corresponding implicit bias in function space. For univariate regression, we show that the solution of training a width-$n$ shallow ReLU network is within $n^{- 1/2}$ of the function which fits the training data and whose difference from the initial function has the smallest 2-norm of the second derivative weighted by a curvature penalty that depends on the probability distribution that is used to initialize the network parameters. We compute the curvature penalty function explicitly for various common initialization procedures. For instance, asymmetric initialization with a uniform distribution yields a constant curvature penalty, and thence the solution function is the natural cubic spline interpolation of the training data. \hj{For stochastic gradient descent we obtain the same implicit bias result.} We obtain a similar result for different activation functions. For multivariate regression we show an analogous result, whereby the second derivative is replaced by the Radon transform of a fractional Laplacian. For initialization schemes that yield a constant penalty function, the solutions are polyharmonic splines. Moreover, we show that the training trajectories are captured by trajectories of smoothing splines with decreasing regularization strength.  ( 2 min )

We study kernel methods in machine learning from the perspective of feature subspace. We establish a one-to-one correspondence between feature subspaces and kernels and propose an information-theoretic measure for kernels. In particular, we construct a kernel from Hirschfeld--Gebelein--R\'{e}nyi maximal correlation functions, coined the maximal correlation kernel, and demonstrate its information-theoretic optimality. We use the support vector machine (SVM) as an example to illustrate a connection between kernel methods and feature extraction approaches. We show that the kernel SVM on maximal correlation kernel achieves minimum prediction error. Finally, we interpret the Fisher kernel as a special maximal correlation kernel and establish its optimality.  ( 2 min )

Riemannian manifold Hamiltonian (RMHMC) and Lagrangian Monte Carlo (LMC) have emerged as powerful methods of Bayesian inference. Unlike Euclidean Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (EHMC) and the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA), the geometric ergodicity of these Riemannian algorithms has not been extensively studied. On the other hand, the manifold Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MMALA) has recently been shown to exhibit geometric ergodicity under certain conditions. This work investigates the mixture of the LMC and RMHMC transition kernels with MMALA in order to equip the resulting method with an "inherited" geometric ergodicity theory. We motivate this mixture kernel based on an analogy between single-step HMC and MALA. We then proceed to evaluate the original and modified transition kernels on several benchmark Bayesian inference tasks.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we study the online learning of real-valued functions where the hidden function is known to have certain smoothness properties. Specifically, for $q \ge 1$, let $\mathcal F_q$ be the class of absolutely continuous functions $f: [0,1] \to \mathbb R$ such that $\|f'\|_q \le 1$. For $q \ge 1$ and $d \in \mathbb Z^+$, let $\mathcal F_{q,d}$ be the class of functions $f: [0,1]^d \to \mathbb R$ such that any function $g: [0,1] \to \mathbb R$ formed by fixing all but one parameter of $f$ is in $\mathcal F_q$. For any class of real-valued functions $\mathcal F$ and $p>0$, let $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F)$ be the best upper bound on the sum of $p^{\text{th}}$ powers of absolute prediction errors that a learner can guarantee in the worst case. In the single-variable setup, we find new bounds for $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)$ that are sharp up to a constant factor. We show for all $\varepsilon \in (0, 1)$ that $\text{opt}_{1+\varepsilon}(\mathcal{F}_{\infty}) = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ and $\text{opt}_{1+\varepsilon}(\mathcal{F}_q) = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ for all $q \ge 2$. We also show for $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$ that $\text{opt}_2(\mathcal F_{1+\varepsilon})=\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1})$. In addition, we obtain new exact results by proving that $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)=1$ for $q \in (1,2)$ and $p \ge 2+\frac{1}{q-1}$. In the multi-variable setup, we establish inequalities relating $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_{q,d})$ to $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_q)$ and show that $\text{opt}_p(\mathcal F_{\infty,d})$ is infinite when $pd$. We also obtain sharp bounds on learning $\mathcal F_{\infty,d}$ for $p < d$ when the number of trials is bounded.  ( 2 min )

Motivated by applications in text mining and discrete distribution inference, we investigate the testing for equality of probability mass functions of $K$ groups of high-dimensional multinomial distributions. A test statistic, which is shown to have an asymptotic standard normal distribution under the null, is proposed. The optimal detection boundary is established, and the proposed test is shown to achieve this optimal detection boundary across the entire parameter space of interest. The proposed method is demonstrated in simulation studies and applied to analyze two real-world datasets to examine variation among consumer reviews of Amazon movies and diversity of statistical paper abstracts.  ( 2 min )

With rapid development of techniques to measure brain activity and structure, statistical methods for analyzing modern brain-imaging play an important role in the advancement of science. Imaging data that measure brain function are usually multivariate time series and are heterogeneous across both imaging sources and subjects, which lead to various statistical and computational challenges. In this paper, we propose a group-based method to cluster a collection of multivariate time series via a Bayesian mixture of smoothing splines. Our method assumes each multivariate time series is a mixture of multiple components with different mixing weights. Time-independent covariates are assumed to be associated with the mixture components and are incorporated via logistic weights of a mixture-of-experts model. We formulate this approach under a fully Bayesian framework using Gibbs sampling where the number of components is selected based on a deviance information criterion. The proposed method is compared to existing methods via simulation studies and is applied to a study on functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which aims to understand infant emotional reactivity and recovery from stress. The results reveal distinct patterns of brain activity, as well as associations between these patterns and selected covariates.  ( 2 min )

We study tail risk dynamics in high-frequency financial markets and their connection with trading activity and market uncertainty. We introduce a dynamic extreme value regression model accommodating both stationary and local unit-root predictors to appropriately capture the time-varying behaviour of the distribution of high-frequency extreme losses. To characterize trading activity and market uncertainty, we consider several volatility and liquidity predictors, and propose a two-step adaptive $L_1$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator to select the most appropriate ones. We establish the oracle property of the proposed estimator for selecting both stationary and local unit-root predictors, and show its good finite sample properties in an extensive simulation study. Studying the high-frequency extreme losses of nine large liquid U.S. stocks using 42 liquidity and volatility predictors, we find the severity of extreme losses to be well predicted by low levels of price impact in period of high volatility of liquidity and volatility.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great potential, but is currently full of overhyping and pipe dreams. We point to some difficulties with current research which we feel are endemic to the direction taken by the community. To us, the current direction is not likely to lead to "deployable" RL: RL that works in practice and can work in practical situations yet still is economically viable. We also propose a potential fix to some of the difficulties of the field.  ( 2 min )

(Conditional) Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have found great success in recent years, due to their ability to approximate (conditional) distributions over extremely high dimensional spaces. However, they are highly unstable and computationally expensive to train, especially in the time series setting. Recently, it has been proposed the use of a key object in rough path theory, called the signature of a path, which is able to convert the min-max formulation given by the (conditional) GAN framework into a classical minimization problem. However, this method is extremely expensive in terms of memory cost, sometimes even becoming prohibitive. To overcome this, we propose the use of \textit{Conditional Neural Stochastic Differential Equations}, which have a constant memory cost as a function of depth, being more memory efficient than traditional deep learning architectures. We empirically test that this proposed model is more efficient than other classical approaches, both in terms of memory cost and computational time, and that it usually outperforms them in terms of performance.  ( 2 min )

submitted by /u/WaggleMcDaggle [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

Hi everyone So i write a lot of quotes to do with various building jobs on ms word and I'm wondering if there's an ai that i can get to read all the quotes I've ever written and then get to write quotes for me based on a few promts. eg if i say replace a bathroom with a shower and bath in it and it will write the quote or the brunt of it for me. submitted by /u/pummers88 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

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​ https://preview.redd.it/oca9tqrfq9aa1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=8194a46975518ee82e5ecbd4654cbb2b69739545 Baidu Research today released its predictions for the top 10 technology trends of 2023, including big models, digital-real convergence, virtual-real symbiosis, autonomous driving, robotics, scientific computing, quantum computing, privacy computing, ethics in technology, and sustainability. For more: http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=178 submitted by /u/trcytony [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

submitted by /u/okaris [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

They are like other jobs. If Al can master emotional/artistic jobs, medicine, law etc why not something like coding? Personally I believe that 95% of each field will loose their jobs and the 5% that will remain will have more a supervisory role. P submitted by /u/Ok_Dragonfly_2167 [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging has the potential to transform the way we diagnose and treat various health conditions. From X-rays to MRI scans, these techniques allow doctors to see inside the human body and identify problems that might not be visible to the naked eye. However, the adoption of AI in the medical field is not without challenges. A recent study has explored the determinants for the adoption of AI-powered decision-making support systems in the medical imaging workflow. The study used data from clinicians who participated in an international evaluation of healthcare practitioners and applied confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to understand the factors that influence the adoption and usage of AI in medical imaging. The results of the study showed that understanding the role of security, risk, and trust is crucial for the intended usage of AI in the medical imaging workflow. These findings provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners looking to understand the adoption and acceptance of AI in the medical field. As AI continues to make advances in the field of medical imaging, it is important to consider the role of these factors in the adoption and acceptance of AI by healthcare practitioners. By understanding and addressing these challenges, we can ensure that the adoption of AI in medical imaging is seamless and effective. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges to the widespread adoption of AI in the medical imaging workflow? submitted by /u/FMCalisto [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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Apple quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by AI in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market - but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple's anti-competitive behaviour. Apple's development of AI to narrate books could represent a significant shift in how major technology companies see the future of audiobooks. In recent months, Apple approached independent publishers as potential partners, including some in the Canadian market, but not all agreed to participate Apple would shoulder the costs of production and writers would receive royalties from sales. The Future While there is potential for backlash by professional voice actors, authors themselves are increasingly being asked to narrate their own books There is a financial incentive for the writers, both in the upfront payments and the expanded availability of their work But producing an audiobook with a human voice can take weeks and can cost publishers thousands of dollars Apple and Amazon For years, Apple has sold books and audiobooks through its Books app Apple was rumored to be interested in developing its own audiobook service and shifting from a reseller to a producer The move represents a direct shot at rival Amazon, with Apple listing what it said were the benefits of its own system compared to Kindle's Direct Publishing Lawmakers in Europe and the United States have put in place increasing scrutiny of the company in the wake of allegations that Apple limits competition ​ This is from the AI With Vibes Newsletter, read the full issue here: https://aiwithvibes.beehiiv.com/p/new-world-goodbye-homework-elon-loves-ai-essays submitted by /u/Mk_Makanaki [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

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Hi, I was simply wondering how that kind of videos are made. I guess there is a video "reference" layer (camera movement and some simple shapes ?), then an AI pass that applies some prompts on it ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeYUirOYiE4 https://twitter.com/ArtificialBob/status/1579404863825653763 ​ Could someone link a tutorial so I could understand the process ? Thanks ! submitted by /u/grosbouff [link] [comments]  ( 51 min )

submitted by /u/BackgroundResult [link] [comments]  ( 24 min )

Sure! Here is a more detailed version of the script adapted for a Reddit post: Hello Redditors! I wanted to share some practical strategies that you can use to get rich. Whether you're just starting out on your wealth-building journey or you're looking for ways to take your financial situation to the next level, these strategies can help. Define your financial goals Before you get started, it's important to define what "getting rich" means to you. This might involve setting a specific financial goal, like saving a certain amount of money or achieving a certain level of income. It's important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve so that you can stay motivated and focused as you work towards financial success. Create a plan Once you have your goals in mind, it's time to devel…  ( 56 min )

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Does anyone in the community have any recommended open source AI projects to get that are still available? I've heard ChatGPT has a few open source community driven competitors? Additionally, does anyone have any recommended open source AI image/video upres programs they use? I really want to try and preserve (and hopefully contribute) to what's out there currently. I know there has been a large movement to keep open source AI projects alive while these private groups gain momentum. Also, this goes out to the mods, but maybe we should have a pinned post with a list of community driven/open source AI that people can download, mess with, and hopefully contribute to? submitted by /u/OldsDiesel [link] [comments]  ( 41 min )

A lot of interesting models that came out recently have been using the transformer architecture, or otherwise required a lot of VRAM, such amounts, in fact, that it has become unattainable to even just run inference for almost everyone, because the amount of necessary VRAM can only be attained by pooling together numerous >1k usd GPUs. But VRAM in itself isn't that crazy expensive, it's the the rest of that super powerful GPU that's attached to them that's expensive. If I understand correctly, some manufacturers, like, say, Apple, have been using common pool of memory for both RAM and VRAM, thereby having GPUs with a crazy amount of VRAM. For example, their least expensive Mac Studio has an amount of VRAM equivalent to an A100. So my question is, does a unified memory pool (common RAM and VRAM) lead to more capable inference? And if so, should/will manufacturers gravitate towards such a hardware solution? And are there any technical obstacles inhibiting such a path? submitted by /u/whyvitamins [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

There are a number of companies out there making special-purpose chip "neuromorphic" architectures that are supposed to be better suited for neural networks. Some of them you can buy for as little as $500. Most of them are designed for Spiking Neural Networks, probably because of the similarity to the human brain. Innatera's chip implements the neural network on an analog computer, which I find very interesting. Is the performance really better than GPUs? Could this achieve the the dream of running a model on as little power as the brain uses? Are spiking neural networks useful for anything? I don't know of any tasks where a SNN is the current state-of-the-art in performance. All the good results right now seem to be coming out of transformers, but maybe that's just because they're so well-suited for the hardware we have available. submitted by /u/currentscurrents [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

Hey guys! Just wondering what the state of the art is for off the shelf head pose estimation. I’m looking to compute the pitch, yaw, and roll values for the heads in some videos I’m processing. I need something that will work off the shelf that’s a bit more reliable than using landmark based methods. Thank you! submitted by /u/TightestKnees [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

While long ago I hailed from the realm of biochemistry, I'm sitting more on the data side these days and can't help but be nostalgic for the possible use of generative neural nets on the bio side. Having a little curiosity, I found that this work has already began somewhat. For instance, this group managed to get a reasonable design schema by incorporating Attention into their GANs: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-021-00310-5 To me then, if we can develop "reasonable" (i.e. soluble among other properties) protein sequences using GANs, a natural extension would be to train them for selective binding. For instance, imagine adding the loss from a pre-trained Discriminator that predicts binding a certain target into the above. On one hand, that seems like a tall order, but given some of the research I've thumbed through, I believe such a discriminator is already shown as tenable. Here's a few papers: A meta review of the topic An implementation using Attention Another implementation Being able to serve up amino acid sequences with selective binding properties seems really really attractive and a natural "next step" for GAN research here. The closest I have seen though is this work which is more of the flavor of redesigning a sequence rather than a de novo approach. Anyways, I'm no researcher in the field and don't have a dog in the fight so to speak, but it's just an exciting thought to me. Curious if it's been done yet? And if not, just interested in sparking some discussion in case others have similar interests. submitted by /u/jshkk [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

https://iap.gridspace.com/ First week is on sound and DSP. Second week on NLP and language. Third on speech ML models. And fourth week on applications. There's a signup google form on the site. submitted by /u/arrowoftime [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

A friend and I are working on a project that requires us to take images as input find images that match them from our database. What is the most effective way to do this? We've tried SIFT and a few similar solutions, but nothing's been super effective so far. Does anyone have any suggestions? Are there any solid open-source solutions? submitted by /u/Clarkmilo [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18721/ces-2023-amd-instinct-mi300-data-center-apu-silicon-in-hand-146b-transistors-shipping-h223 I wonder if this is the beginning of dissolution of NVIDIA's monopoly on AI. submitted by /u/samobon [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Hi, has anyone done any work in using ML or RL to automate providing liquidity in uniswapv3? Rewards are based on volume against the TVL, you earn a percentage of each trade, so high volume in a low liquidity market can earn some very good rewards as long as the price is stable enough that it doesn't effect the APR.. ideally i'd like to assess trends in volume based on TA indicators and then assign a portion of funds to the pool based on some forecasted returns.. i'm a complete newbie but come from a data engineering background, so i'd like to figure out of there's any where i can look into starting from or if the is a completely green field subject for now. submitted by /u/adamnmcc [link] [comments]  ( 24 min )

Announcing the Airlift Challenge Competition Website: https://airliftchallenge.com The Airlift Challenge seeks improved algorithms to plan and execute airlift operations in the face of dynamic disruptions. Participants compete by submitting OpenAI Gym-based agents that minimize delivery time and cost using reinforcement learning, optimization, heuristics, or any other technique. Overview Airlifts demand the delivery of large sets of cargo into areas of need under tight deadlines. Yet, there are many obstacles preventing timely delivery. Airports have limited capacity to process airplanes, thus limiting throughput and potentially creating bottlenecks. Weather disruptions can cause delays or force airplanes to re-route. Unexpected cargo may be staged for an urgent delivery. This competi…  ( 63 min )

Which is the best possible method to combine the embeddings of two words. Example is "comparison" + "contrast" and "expansion" and "restatement". So I want the ML model to understand that contrast is more related to comparison and restatement is more related to expansion. My initial institution is vector addition of the embeddings of these words. I would like to hear you feedbacks on the same. Thanks in advance :-) submitted by /u/BothEntertainment786 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

I am working on a classification churn model, I have used feature importance to show the features' importance at model fit. I used shap values to show permutation importance of each feature. But I feel it's harder to represent causation of the prediction to each feature. Any ideas ? submitted by /u/spb-world [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

Have you ever wanted to invest in a US ETF or mutual fund, but found that many of the actively managed index trackers were expensive or out of reach due to regulations? I have recently developed a solution to this problem that allows small investors to create their sparse stock portfolios for tracking an index by proposing a novel population-based large-scale non-convex optimization method via a Deep Generative Model that learns to sample good portfolios. Sparse VGT Tracker - QuantConnect Backtest I've compared this approach to the state-of-the-art evolutionary strategy (Fast CMA-ES) and found that it is more efficient at finding optimal index-tracking portfolios. The PyTorch implementations of both methods and the dataset are available on my GitHub repository for reproducibility and further improvement. Check out the repository to learn more about this new meta-learning approach for evolutionary optimization, or run your small index fund at home! Best Index-Tracking Validation Loss Achieved on Out-of-Sample Period in 100 Epochs submitted by /u/k_yuksel [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

I've a isolation forest model in production environment that trains every time we try to find anomalies and it classifies different points as anomalies. What should I do such that only most likely anomaly points are provided as results and results don't differ much? I do not want to set random state. submitted by /u/TKMater [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

Hi everyone! I programmed a learning chatbot for (a clone of) the MOS KIM-1, hailing from 1976 with its 6502 CPU and 1K RAM. Basically, it works this way - you give it a byte, and it answers with a byte; at the same time, it learns from each interaction, which byte "should" answer which, and updates its knowledge base accordingly. It actually runs on a KIM Uno, an Arduino based clone of the KIM-1. This is the GitHub page with the code, contained in two short programs: one (optional) to slighly pre-populate the knowledge base with about a dozen of bytes that would constitute a nucleus of original replies (to be evolved into "your" interactions, as you chat on), starting from $0100, as well as the actual chatbot program to be launched from $0200 (the "user input" byte is to be entered prior to run in $0010, and the reply will be contained after run at $0013, so yes, you are "chatting" in hex), in each case, both in assembler and already assembled (and ready to be entered into the KIM-1): https://github.com/KedalionDaimon/MOS-KIM-1-chatbot And this is my YouTube video, presenting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MJgi5kua3M submitted by /u/NinoIvanov [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

Hi everyone, I am having a chunk of textual conversational data which I need to analyze for topics in it. I am currently using BERTopic to do it but the issue with it is that it does hard clustering, i.e., each datapoint belongs to exactly one topic cluster. But many of the sentences are multi intent and do fall in many topics simultaneously. Can soft/fuzzy clustering , where each datapoint can belong to more than one topic clusters, be done via BERTopic? If yes, then how can it be implemented? If not, which other algorithms can be used? submitted by /u/Devinco001 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

Computer engineering has come a long way from merely being a curriculum major to a key credential for your AI portfolio. Artificial engineering is a role that commands huge skill and expertise in the realm of technology. Unsurprisingly, the demand for their services outstrips the supply. The industry is oozing with valuable companies with diversified… Read More »AI Engineer: Learn About The Role And Skills Needed For Success In 2023 The post AI Engineer: Learn About The Role And Skills Needed For Success In 2023 appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

I became a true data hound after a stint as a market analyst in the semiconductor industry. The role involved these activities: The habits and mindset I developed as a data hound, forecaster, and spreadsheet jockey inform the way I track emerging data technology trends to this day. So I thought I’d share the main… Read More »Seven steps to simple DIY market forecasting The post Seven steps to simple DIY market forecasting appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

submitted by /u/Kamal_Ata_Turk [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

Have you ever wanted to invest in a US ETF or mutual fund, but found that many of the actively managed index trackers were expensive or out of reach due to regulations? I have recently developed a solution to this problem that allows small investors to create their sparse stock portfolios for tracking an index by proposing a novel population-based large-scale non-convex optimization method via a Deep Generative Model that learns to sample good portfolios. Sparse VGT Tracker - QuantConnect Backtest I've compared this approach to the state-of-the-art evolutionary strategy (Fast CMA-ES) and found that it is more efficient at finding optimal index-tracking portfolios. The PyTorch implementations of both methods and the dataset are available on my GitHub repository for reproducibility and further improvement. Check out the repository to learn more about this new meta-learning approach for evolutionary optimization, or run your small index fund at home! Best Index-Tracking Validation Loss Achieved on Out-of-Sample Period in 100 Epochs submitted by /u/k_yuksel [link] [comments]  ( 24 min )

Today, I read the paper about InstructGPT on which ChatGPT is based, and I was surprised to see that it uses reinforcement learning in the training process. It uses PPO to optimize its prompts on a reward signal given by another trained model. Though I found this approach really interesting, I was left wondering how prompts are created by the policy. I have never heard of PPO being used to generate text before, and I am very curious as to what this action-space looks like. Does anyone here have any insight on this? Also, it would be very interesting to hear what people here think RL advances can do for further research in generative models like this! submitted by /u/Embarrassed-Print-13 [link] [comments]  ( 57 min )

Since it depends on sample efficiency (which varies by method), the average method used to train the Model finally deployed is in consideration. View Poll submitted by /u/XecutionStyle [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

The role-playing game “On the Plane” simulates xenophobia to foster greater understanding and reflection via virtual experiences.  ( 9 min )

Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is heading to the mainstream. The NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem showcased significant milestones toward widespread intelligent transportation at CES. Growth is occurring in vehicle deployment plans as well as AI solutions integrating further into the car. Foxconn joined the NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem. The world’s largest technology manufacturer will produce electronic control units Read article >  ( 6 min )

GFN Thursday rings in the new year with a recap of the biggest cloud gaming news from CES 2023: the GeForce NOW Ultimate membership. Powered by the latest NVIDIA GPU technology, Ultimate members can play their favorite PC games at performance never before available from the cloud. Plus, with a new year comes new games. Read article >  ( 7 min )

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we take the role of investigators who want to trace the attack and identify the source, that is, the particular model which the adversarial examples are generated from. Techniques derived would aid forensic investigation of attack incidents and serve as deterrence to potential attacks. We consider the buyers-seller setting where a machine learning model is to be distributed to various buyers and each buyer receives a slightly different copy with same functionality. A malicious buyer generates adversarial examples from a particular copy $\mathcal{M}_i$ and uses them to attack other copies. From these adversarial examples, the investigator wants to identify the source $\mathcal{M}_i$. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage separate-and-trace framework. The model separation stage generates multiple copies of a model for a same classification task. This process injects unique characteristics into each copy so that adversarial examples generated have distinct and traceable features. We give a parallel structure which embeds a ``tracer'' in each copy, and a noise-sensitive training loss to achieve this goal. The tracing stage takes in adversarial examples and a few candidate models, and identifies the likely source. Based on the unique features induced by the noise-sensitive loss function, we could effectively trace the potential adversarial copy by considering the output logits from each tracer. Empirical results show that it is possible to trace the origin of the adversarial example and the mechanism can be applied to a wide range of architectures and datasets.

Conventional representation learning algorithms for knowledge graphs (KG) map each entity to a unique embedding vector, ignoring the rich information contained in the neighborhood. We propose a method named StarGraph, which gives a novel way to utilize the neighborhood information for large-scale knowledge graphs to obtain entity representations. An incomplete two-hop neighborhood subgraph for each target node is at first generated, then processed by a modified self-attention network to obtain the entity representation, which is used to replace the entity embedding in conventional methods. We achieved SOTA performance on ogbl-wikikg2 and got competitive results on fb15k-237. The experimental results proves that StarGraph is efficient in parameters, and the improvement made on ogbl-wikikg2 demonstrates its great effectiveness of representation learning on large-scale knowledge graphs. The code is now available at \url{https://github.com/hzli-ucas/StarGraph}.

In data containing heterogeneous subpopulations, classification performance benefits from incorporating the knowledge of cluster structure in the classifier. Previous methods for such combined clustering and classification either 1) are classifier-specific and not generic, or 2) independently perform clustering and classifier training, which may not form clusters that can potentially benefit classifier performance. The question of how to perform clustering to improve the performance of classifiers trained on the clusters has received scant attention in previous literature, despite its importance in several real-world applications. In this paper, first, we theoretically analyze the generalization performance of classifiers trained on clustered data and find conditions under which clustering can potentially aid classification. This motivates the design of a simple k-means-based classification algorithm called Clustering Aware Classification (CAC) and its neural variant {DeepCAC}. DeepCAC effectively leverages deep representation learning to learn latent embeddings and finds clusters in a manner that make the clustered data suitable for training classifiers for each underlying subpopulation. Our experiments on synthetic and real benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of DeepCAC over previous methods for combined clustering and classification.

Learning discriminative representations of unlabelled data is a challenging task. Contrastive self-supervised learning provides a framework to learn meaningful representations using learned notions of similarity measures from simple pretext tasks. In this work, we propose a simple and efficient framework for self-supervised image segmentation using contrastive learning on image patches, without using explicit pretext tasks or any further labeled fine-tuning. A fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) is trained in a self-supervised manner to discern features in the input images and obtain confidence maps which capture the network's belief about the objects belonging to the same class. Positive- and negative- patches are sampled based on the average entropy in the confidence maps for contrastive learning. Convergence is assumed when the information separation between the positive patches is small, and the positive-negative pairs is large. The proposed model only consists of a simple FCNN with 10.8k parameters and requires about 5 minutes to converge on the high resolution microscopy datasets, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the relevant self-supervised methods to attain similar performance. We evaluate the proposed method for the task of segmenting nuclei from two histopathology datasets, and show comparable performance with relevant self-supervised and supervised methods.

There is a growing interest in developing unlearnable examples (UEs) against visual privacy leaks on the Internet. UEs are training samples added with invisible but unlearnable noise, which have been found can prevent unauthorized training of machine learning models. UEs typically are generated via a bilevel optimization framework with a surrogate model to remove (minimize) errors from the original samples, and then applied to protect the data against unknown target models. However, existing UE generation methods all rely on an ideal assumption called label-consistency, where the hackers and protectors are assumed to hold the same label for a given sample. In this work, we propose and promote a more practical label-agnostic setting, where the hackers may exploit the protected data quite differently from the protectors. E.g., a m-class unlearnable dataset held by the protector may be exploited by the hacker as a n-class dataset. Existing UE generation methods are rendered ineffective in this challenging setting. To tackle this challenge, we present a novel technique called Unlearnable Clusters (UCs) to generate label-agnostic unlearnable examples with cluster-wise perturbations. Furthermore, we propose to leverage VisionandLanguage Pre-trained Models (VLPMs) like CLIP as the surrogate model to improve the transferability of the crafted UCs to diverse domains. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach under a variety of settings with different datasets, target models, and even commercial platforms Microsoft Azure and Baidu PaddlePaddle.

In the paper, we study a class of useful minimax problems on Riemanian manifolds and propose a class of effective Riemanian gradient-based methods to solve these minimax problems. Specifically, we propose an effective Riemannian gradient descent ascent (RGDA) algorithm for the deterministic minimax optimization. Moreover, we prove that our RGDA has a sample complexity of $O(\kappa^2\epsilon^{-2})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary solution of the Geodesically-Nonconvex Strongly-Concave (GNSC) minimax problems, where $\kappa$ denotes the condition number. At the same time, we present an effective Riemannian stochastic gradient descent ascent (RSGDA) algorithm for the stochastic minimax optimization, which has a sample complexity of $O(\kappa^4\epsilon^{-4})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary solution. To further reduce the sample complexity, we propose an accelerated Riemannian stochastic gradient descent ascent (Acc-RSGDA) algorithm based on the momentum-based variance-reduced technique. We prove that our Acc-RSGDA algorithm achieves a lower sample complexity of $\tilde{O}(\kappa^{4}\epsilon^{-3})$ in searching for an $\epsilon$-stationary solution of the GNSC minimax problems. Extensive experimental results on the robust distributional optimization and robust Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training over Stiefel manifold demonstrate efficiency of our algorithms.

As one of the prevalent methods to achieve automation systems, Imitation Learning (IL) presents a promising performance in a wide range of domains. However, despite the considerable improvement in policy performance, the corresponding research on the explainability of IL models is still limited. Inspired by the recent approaches in explainable artificial intelligence methods, we proposed a model-agnostic explaining framework for IL models called R2RISE. R2RISE aims to explain the overall policy performance with respect to the frames in demonstrations. It iteratively retrains the black-box IL model from the randomized masked demonstrations and uses the conventional evaluation outcome environment returns as the coefficient to build an importance map. We also conducted experiments to investigate three major questions concerning frames' importance equality, the effectiveness of the importance map, and connections between importance maps from different IL models. The result shows that R2RISE successfully distinguishes important frames from the demonstrations.

In this work we propose a deep learning approach to clean spectroscopy signals using only uncleaned data. Cleaning signals from spectroscopy instrument noise is challenging as noise exhibits an unknown, non-zero mean, multivariate distributions. Our framework is a siamese neural net that learns identifiable disentanglement of the signal and noise components under a stationarity assumption. The disentangled representations satisfy reconstruction fidelity, reduce consistencies with measurements of unrelated targets and imposes relaxed-orthogonality constraints between the signal and noise representations. Evaluations on a laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) dataset from the ChemCam instrument onboard the Martian Curiosity rover show a superior performance in cleaning LIBS measurements compared to the standard feature engineered approaches being used by the ChemCam team.  ( 2 min )

Spear Phishing is a harmful cyber-attack facing business and individuals worldwide. Considerable research has been conducted recently into the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to detect spear-phishing emails. ML-based solutions may suffer from zero-day attacks; unseen attacks unaccounted for in the training data. As new attacks emerge, classifiers trained on older data are unable to detect these new varieties of attacks resulting in increasingly inaccurate predictions. Spear Phishing detection also faces scalability challenges due to the growth of the required features which is proportional to the number of the senders within a receiver mailbox. This differs from traditional phishing attacks which typically perform only a binary classification between phishing and benign emails. Therefore, we devise a possible solution to these problems, named RAIDER: Reinforcement AIded Spear Phishing DEtectoR. A reinforcement-learning based feature evaluation system that can automatically find the optimum features for detecting different types of attacks. By leveraging a reward and penalty system, RAIDER allows for autonomous features selection. RAIDER also keeps the number of features to a minimum by selecting only the significant features to represent phishing emails and detect spear-phishing attacks. After extensive evaluation of RAIDER over 11,000 emails and across 3 attack scenarios, our results suggest that using reinforcement learning to automatically identify the significant features could reduce the dimensions of the required features by 55% in comparison to existing ML-based systems. It also improves the accuracy of detecting spoofing attacks by 4% from 90% to 94%. In addition, RAIDER demonstrates reasonable detection accuracy even against a sophisticated attack named Known Sender in which spear-phishing emails greatly resemble those of the impersonated sender.  ( 3 min )

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, hypernetworks are trained to generate behaviors across a range of unseen task conditions, via a novel TD-based training objective and data from a set of near-optimal RL solutions for training tasks. This work relates to meta RL, contextual RL, and transfer learning, with a particular focus on zero-shot performance at test time, enabled by knowledge of the task parameters (also known as context). Our technical approach is based upon viewing each RL algorithm as a mapping from the MDP specifics to the near-optimal value function and policy and seek to approximate it with a hypernetwork that can generate near-optimal value functions and policies, given the parameters of the MDP. We show that, under certain conditions, this mapping can be considered as a supervised learning problem. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our method for zero-shot transfer to new reward and transition dynamics on a series of continuous control tasks from DeepMind Control Suite. Our method demonstrates significant improvements over baselines from multitask and meta RL approaches.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

Process monitoring and control are essential in modern industries for ensuring high quality standards and optimizing production performance. These technologies have a long history of application in production and have had numerous positive impacts, but also hold great potential when integrated with Industry 4.0 and advanced machine learning, particularly deep learning, solutions. However, in order to implement these solutions in production and enable widespread adoption, the scalability and transferability of deep learning methods have become a focus of research. While transfer learning has proven successful in many cases, particularly with computer vision and homogenous data inputs, it can be challenging to apply to heterogeneous data. Motivated by the need to transfer and standardize established processes to different, non-identical environments and by the challenge of adapting to heterogeneous data representations, this work introduces the Domain Adaptation Neural Network with Cyclic Supervision (DBACS) approach. DBACS addresses the issue of model generalization through domain adaptation, specifically for heterogeneous data, and enables the transfer and scalability of deep learning-based statistical control methods in a general manner. Additionally, the cyclic interactions between the different parts of the model enable DBACS to not only adapt to the domains, but also match them. To the best of our knowledge, DBACS is the first deep learning approach to combine adaptation and matching for heterogeneous data settings. For comparison, this work also includes subspace alignment and a multi-view learning that deals with heterogeneous representations by mapping data into correlated latent feature spaces. Finally, DBACS with its ability to adapt and match, is applied to a virtual metrology use case for an etching process run on different machine types in semiconductor manufacturing.

Although many studies have successfully applied transfer learning to medical image segmentation, very few of them have investigated the selection strategy when multiple source tasks are available for transfer. In this paper, we propose a prior knowledge guided and transferability based framework to select the best source tasks among a collection of brain image segmentation tasks, to improve the transfer learning performance on the given target task. The framework consists of modality analysis, RoI (region of interest) analysis, and transferability estimation, such that the source task selection can be refined step by step. Specifically, we adapt the state-of-the-art analytical transferability estimation metrics to medical image segmentation tasks and further show that their performance can be significantly boosted by filtering candidate source tasks based on modality and RoI characteristics. Our experiments on brain matter, brain tumor, and white matter hyperintensities segmentation datasets reveal that transferring from different tasks under the same modality is often more successful than transferring from the same task under different modalities. Furthermore, within the same modality, transferring from the source task that has stronger RoI shape similarity with the target task can significantly improve the final transfer performance. And such similarity can be captured using the Structural Similarity index in the label space.

We consider the problem of two active particles in 2D complex flows with the multi-objective goals of minimizing both the dispersion rate and the energy consumption of the pair. We approach the problem by means of Multi Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), combining scalarization techniques together with a Q-learning algorithm, for Lagrangian drifters that have variable swimming velocity. We show that MORL is able to find a set of trade-off solutions forming an optimal Pareto frontier. As a benchmark, we show that a set of heuristic strategies are dominated by the MORL solutions. We consider the situation in which the agents cannot update their control variables continuously, but only after a discrete (decision) time, $\tau$. We show that there is a range of decision times, in between the Lyapunov time and the continuous updating limit, where Reinforcement Learning finds strategies that significantly improve over heuristics. In particular, we discuss how large decision times require enhanced knowledge of the flow, whereas for smaller $\tau$ all a priori heuristic strategies become Pareto optimal.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have exhibited impressive performance on image super-resolution tasks. However, these deep learning-based super-resolution methods perform poorly in real-world super-resolution tasks, where the paired high-resolution and low-resolution images are unavailable and the low-resolution images are degraded by complicated and unknown kernels. To break these limitations, we propose the Unsupervised Bi-directional Cycle Domain Transfer Learning-based Generative Adversarial Network (UBCDTL-GAN), which consists of an Unsupervised Bi-directional Cycle Domain Transfer Network (UBCDTN) and the Semantic Encoder guided Super Resolution Network (SESRN). First, the UBCDTN is able to produce an approximated real-like LR image through transferring the LR image from an artificially degraded domain to the real-world LR image domain. Second, the SESRN has the ability to super-resolve the approximated real-like LR image to a photo-realistic HR image. Extensive experiments on unpaired real-world image benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Building models that comply with the invariances inherent to different domains, such as invariance under translation or rotation, is a key aspect of applying machine learning to real world problems like molecular property prediction, medical imaging, protein folding or LiDAR classification. For the first time, we study how the invariances of a model can be leveraged to provably guarantee the robustness of its predictions. We propose a gray-box approach, enhancing the powerful black-box randomized smoothing technique with white-box knowledge about invariances. First, we develop gray-box certificates based on group orbits, which can be applied to arbitrary models with invariance under permutation and Euclidean isometries. Then, we derive provably tight gray-box certificates. We experimentally demonstrate that the provably tight certificates can offer much stronger guarantees, but that in practical scenarios the orbit-based method is a good approximation.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) models universally suffer from the notorious edge-fattening issue. Triplet loss, as a widespread metric learning strategy, has largely succeeded in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we redesign the patch-based triplet loss in MDE to alleviate the ubiquitous edge-fattening issue. We show two drawbacks of the raw triplet loss in MDE and demonstrate our problem-driven redesigns. First, we present a min. operator based strategy applied to all negative samples, to prevent well-performing negatives sheltering the error of edge-fattening negatives. Second, we split the anchor-positive distance and anchor-negative distance from within the original triplet, which directly optimizes the positives without any mutual effect with the negatives. Extensive experiments show the combination of these two small redesigns can achieve unprecedented results: Our powerful and versatile triplet loss not only makes our model outperform all previous SoTA by a large margin, but also provides substantial performance boosts to a large number of existing models, while introducing no extra inference computation at all.

Stochastic differential equations of Langevin-diffusion form have received significant attention, thanks to their foundational role in both Bayesian sampling algorithms and optimization in machine learning. In the latter, they serve as a conceptual model of the stochastic gradient flow in training over-parametrized models. However, the literature typically assumes smoothness of the potential, whose gradient is the drift term. Nevertheless, there are many problems, for which the potential function is not continuously differentiable, and hence the drift is not Lipschitz continuous everywhere. This is exemplified by robust losses and Rectified Linear Units in regression problems. In this paper, we show some foundational results regarding the flow and asymptotic properties of Langevin-type Stochastic Differential Inclusions under assumptions appropriate to the machine-learning settings. In particular, we show strong existence of the solution, as well as asymptotic minimization of the canonical free-energy functional.

Subpopulation shift widely exists in many real-world machine learning applications, referring to the training and test distributions containing the same subpopulation groups but varying in subpopulation frequencies. Importance reweighting is a normal way to handle the subpopulation shift issue by imposing constant or adaptive sampling weights on each sample in the training dataset. However, some recent studies have recognized that most of these approaches fail to improve the performance over empirical risk minimization especially when applied to over-parameterized neural networks. In this work, we propose a simple yet practical framework, called uncertainty-aware mixup (UMIX), to mitigate the overfitting issue in over-parameterized models by reweighting the ''mixed'' samples according to the sample uncertainty. The training-trajectories-based uncertainty estimation is equipped in the proposed UMIX for each sample to flexibly characterize the subpopulation distribution. We also provide insightful theoretical analysis to verify that UMIX achieves better generalization bounds over prior works. Further, we conduct extensive empirical studies across a wide range of tasks to validate the effectiveness of our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/TencentAILabHealthcare/UMIX.

Audio-visual navigation combines sight and hearing to navigate to a sound-emitting source in an unmapped environment. While recent approaches have demonstrated the benefits of audio input to detect and find the goal, they focus on clean and static sound sources and struggle to generalize to unheard sounds. In this work, we propose the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark which requires catching a moving sound source in an environment with noisy and distracting sounds, posing a range of new challenges. We introduce a reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust navigation policy for these complex settings. To achieve this, we propose an architecture that fuses audio-visual information in the spatial feature space to learn correlations of geometric information inherent in both local maps and audio signals. We demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art by a large margin across all tasks of moving sounds, unheard sounds, and noisy environments, on two challenging 3D scanned real-world environments, namely Matterport3D and Replica. The benchmark is available at this http URL  ( 2 min )

Face super-resolution is a domain-specific image super-resolution, which aims to generate High-Resolution (HR) face images from their Low-Resolution (LR) counterparts. In this paper, we propose a novel face super-resolution method, namely Semantic Encoder guided Generative Adversarial Face Ultra-Resolution Network (SEGA-FURN) to ultra-resolve an unaligned tiny LR face image to its HR counterpart with multiple ultra-upscaling factors (e.g., 4x and 8x). The proposed network is composed of a novel semantic encoder that has the ability to capture the embedded semantics to guide adversarial learning and a novel generator that uses a hierarchical architecture named Residual in Internal Dense Block (RIDB). Moreover, we propose a joint discriminator which discriminates both image data and embedded semantics. The joint discriminator learns the joint probability distribution of the image space and latent space. We also use a Relativistic average Least Squares loss (RaLS) as the adversarial loss to alleviate the gradient vanishing problem and enhance the stability of the training procedure. Extensive experiments on large face datasets have proved that the proposed method can achieve superior super-resolution results and significantly outperform other state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

Deep neural models (e.g. Transformer) naturally learn spurious features, which create a ``shortcut'' between the labels and inputs, thus impairing the generalization and robustness. This paper advances self-attention mechanism to its robust variant for Transformer-based pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT). We propose \textit{Adversarial Self-Attention} mechanism (ASA), which adversarially biases the attentions to effectively suppress the model reliance on features (e.g. specific keywords) and encourage its exploration of broader semantics. We conduct comprehensive evaluation across a wide range of tasks for both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. For pre-training, ASA unfolds remarkable performance gain compared to naive training for longer steps. For fine-tuning, ASA-empowered models outweigh naive models by a large margin considering both generalization and robustness.

The recent work ``Combinatorial Optimization with Physics-Inspired Graph Neural Networks'' [Nat Mach Intell 4 (2022) 367] introduces a physics-inspired unsupervised Graph Neural Network (GNN) to solve combinatorial optimization problems on sparse graphs. To test the performances of these GNNs, the authors of the work show numerical results for two fundamental problems: maximum cut and maximum independent set (MIS). They conclude that "the graph neural network optimizer performs on par or outperforms existing solvers, with the ability to scale beyond the state of the art to problems with millions of variables." In this comment, we show that a simple greedy algorithm, running in almost linear time, can find solutions for the MIS problem of much better quality than the GNN. The greedy algorithm is faster by a factor of $10^4$ with respect to the GNN for problems with a million variables. We do not see any good reason for solving the MIS with these GNN, as well as for using a sledgehammer to crack nuts. In general, many claims of superiority of neural networks in solving combinatorial problems are at risk of being not solid enough, since we lack standard benchmarks based on really hard problems. We propose one of such hard benchmarks, and we hope to see future neural network optimizers tested on these problems before any claim of superiority is made.

Entropic regularization provides a generalization of the original optimal transport problem. It introduces a penalty term defined by the Kullback-Leibler divergence, making the problem more tractable via the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm. Replacing the Kullback-Leibler divergence with a general $f$-divergence leads to a natural generalization. The case of divergences defined by superlinear functions was recently studied by Di Marino and Gerolin. Using convex analysis, we extend the theory developed so far to include all $f$-divergences defined by functions of Legendre type, and prove that under some mild conditions, strong duality holds, optimums in both the primal and dual problems are attained, the generalization of the $c$-transform is well-defined, and we give sufficient conditions for the generalized Sinkhorn algorithm to converge to an optimal solution. We propose a practical algorithm for computing an approximate solution of the optimal transport problem with $f$-divergence regularization via the generalized Sinkhorn algorithm. Finally, we present experimental results on synthetic 2-dimensional data, demonstrating the effects of using different $f$-divergences for regularization, which influences convergence speed, numerical stability and sparsity of the optimal coupling.  ( 2 min )

The exponentially growing model size drives the continued success of deep learning, but it brings prohibitive computation and memory cost. From the algorithm perspective, model sparsification and quantization have been studied to alleviate the problem. From the architecture perspective, hardware vendors provide Tensor cores for acceleration. However, it is very challenging to gain practical speedups from sparse, low-precision matrix operations on Tensor cores, because of the strict requirements for data layout and lack of support for efficiently manipulating the low-precision integers. We propose Magicube, a high-performance sparse-matrix library for low-precision integers on Tensor cores. Magicube supports SpMM and SDDMM, two major sparse operations in deep learning with mixed precision. Experimental results on an NVIDIA A100 GPU show that Magicube achieves on average 1.44x (up to 2.37x) speedup over the vendor-optimized library for sparse kernels, and 1.43x speedup over the state-of-the-art with a comparable accuracy for end-to-end sparse Transformer inference.

Crowdsourcing system has emerged as an effective platform for labeling data with relatively low cost by using non-expert workers. Inferring correct labels from multiple noisy answers on data, however, has been a challenging problem, since the quality of the answers varies widely across tasks and workers. Many existing works have assumed that there is a fixed ordering of workers in terms of their skill levels, and focused on estimating worker skills to aggregate the answers from workers with different weights. In practice, however, the worker skill changes widely across tasks, especially when the tasks are heterogeneous. In this paper, we consider a new model, called $d$-type specialization model, in which each task and worker has its own (unknown) type and the reliability of each worker can vary in the type of a given task and that of a worker. We allow that the number $d$ of types can scale in the number of tasks. In this model, we characterize the optimal sample complexity to correctly infer the labels within any given accuracy, and propose label inference algorithms achieving the order-wise optimal limit even when the types of tasks or those of workers are unknown. We conduct experiments both on synthetic and real datasets, and show that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms developed based on more strict model assumptions.  ( 2 min )

Temperature field reconstruction of heat source systems (TFR-HSS) with limited monitoring sensors occurred in thermal management plays an important role in real time health detection system of electronic equipment in engineering. However, prior methods with common interpolations usually cannot provide accurate reconstruction performance as required. In addition, there exists no public dataset for widely research of reconstruction methods to further boost the reconstruction performance and engineering applications. To overcome this problem, this work develops a machine learning modelling benchmark for TFR-HSS task. First, the TFR-HSS task is mathematically modelled from real-world engineering problem and four types of numerically modellings have been constructed to transform the problem into discrete mapping forms. Then, this work proposes a set of machine learning modelling methods, including the general machine learning methods and the deep learning methods, to advance the state-of-the-art methods over temperature field reconstruction. More importantly, this work develops a novel benchmark dataset, namely Temperature Field Reconstruction Dataset (TFRD), to evaluate these machine learning modelling methods for the TFR-HSS task. Finally, a performance analysis of typical methods is given on TFRD, which can be served as the baseline results on this benchmark.  ( 2 min )

Gaussian graphical models provide a powerful framework for uncovering conditional dependence relationships between sets of nodes; they have found applications in a wide variety of fields including sensor and communication networks, physics, finance, and computational biology. Often, one observes data on the nodes and the task is to learn the graph structure, or perform graphical model selection. While this is a well-studied problem with many popular techniques, there are typically three major practical challenges: i) many existing algorithms become computationally intractable in huge-data settings with tens of thousands of nodes; ii) the need for separate data-driven hyperparameter tuning considerably adds to the computational burden; iii) the statistical accuracy of selected edges often deteriorates as the dimension and/or the complexity of the underlying graph structures increase. We tackle these problems by developing the novel Minipatch Graph (MPGraph) estimator. Our approach breaks up the huge graph learning problem into many smaller problems by creating an ensemble of tiny random subsets of both the observations and the nodes, termed minipatches. We then leverage recent advances that use hard thresholding to solve the latent variable graphical model problem to consistently learn the graph on each minipatch. Our approach is computationally fast, embarrassingly parallelizable, memory efficient, and has integrated stability-based hyperparamter tuning. Additionally, we prove that under weaker assumptions than that of the Graphical Lasso, our MPGraph estimator achieves graph selection consistency. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art computational approaches for Gaussian graphical model selection including the BigQUIC algorithm, and empirically demonstrate that our approach is not only more statistically accurate but also extensively faster for huge graph learning problems.  ( 3 min )

We study the following independence testing problem: given access to samples from a distribution $P$ over $\{0,1\}^n$, decide whether $P$ is a product distribution or whether it is $\varepsilon$-far in total variation distance from any product distribution. For arbitrary distributions, this problem requires $\exp(n)$ samples. We show in this work that if $P$ has a sparse structure, then in fact only linearly many samples are required. Specifically, if $P$ is Markov with respect to a Bayesian network whose underlying DAG has in-degree bounded by $d$, then $\tilde{\Theta}(2^{d/2}\cdot n/\varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient for independence testing.

Contrastive learning pre-trains an image encoder using a large amount of unlabeled data such that the image encoder can be used as a general-purpose feature extractor for various downstream tasks. In this work, we propose PoisonedEncoder, a data poisoning attack to contrastive learning. In particular, an attacker injects carefully crafted poisoning inputs into the unlabeled pre-training data, such that the downstream classifiers built based on the poisoned encoder for multiple target downstream tasks simultaneously classify attacker-chosen, arbitrary clean inputs as attacker-chosen, arbitrary classes. We formulate our data poisoning attack as a bilevel optimization problem, whose solution is the set of poisoning inputs; and we propose a contrastive-learning-tailored method to approximately solve it. Our evaluation on multiple datasets shows that PoisonedEncoder achieves high attack success rates while maintaining the testing accuracy of the downstream classifiers built upon the poisoned encoder for non-attacker-chosen inputs. We also evaluate five defenses against PoisonedEncoder, including one pre-processing, three in-processing, and one post-processing defenses. Our results show that these defenses can decrease the attack success rate of PoisonedEncoder, but they also sacrifice the utility of the encoder or require a large clean pre-training dataset.

In this paper, we study a sequential decision-making problem, called Adaptive Sampling for Discovery (ASD). Starting with a large unlabeled dataset, algorithms for ASD adaptively label the points with the goal to maximize the sum of responses. This problem has wide applications to real-world discovery problems, for example drug discovery with the help of machine learning models. ASD algorithms face the well-known exploration-exploitation dilemma. The algorithm needs to choose points that yield information to improve model estimates but it also needs to exploit the model. We rigorously formulate the problem and propose a general information-directed sampling (IDS) algorithm. We provide theoretical guarantees for the performance of IDS in linear, graph and low-rank models. The benefits of IDS are shown in both simulation experiments and real-data experiments for discovering chemical reaction conditions.

For a long time, different recommendation tasks typically require designing task-specific architectures and training objectives. As a result, it is hard to transfer the learned knowledge and representations from one task to another, thus restricting the generalization ability of existing recommendation approaches, e.g., a sequential recommendation model can hardly be applied or transferred to a review generation method. To deal with such issues, considering that language can describe almost anything and language grounding is a powerful medium to represent various problems or tasks, we present a flexible and unified text-to-text paradigm called "Pretrain, Personalized Prompt, and Predict Paradigm" (P5) for recommendation, which unifies various recommendation tasks in a shared framework. In P5, all data such as user-item interactions, user descriptions, item metadata, and user reviews are converted to a common format -- natural language sequences. The rich information from natural language assists P5 to capture deeper semantics for personalization and recommendation. Specifically, P5 learns different tasks with the same language modeling objective during pretraining. Thus, it serves as the foundation model for various downstream recommendation tasks, allows easy integration with other modalities, and enables instruction-based recommendation based on prompts. P5 advances recommender systems from shallow model to deep model to big model, and will revolutionize the technical form of recommender systems towards universal recommendation engine. With adaptive personalized prompt for different users, P5 is able to make predictions in a zero-shot or few-shot manner and largely reduces the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. On several recommendation benchmarks, we conduct experiments to show the effectiveness of P5. We release the source code at https://github.com/jeykigung/P5.

The usage of automated learning agents is becoming increasingly prevalent in many online economic applications such as online auctions and automated trading. Motivated by such applications, this paper is dedicated to fundamental modeling and analysis of the strategic situations that the users of automated learning agents are facing. We consider strategic settings where several users engage in a repeated online interaction, assisted by regret-minimizing learning agents that repeatedly play a "game" on their behalf. We propose to view the outcomes of the agents' dynamics as inducing a "meta-game" between the users. Our main focus is on whether users can benefit in this meta-game from "manipulating" their own agents by misreporting their parameters to them. We define a general framework to model and analyze these strategic interactions between users of learning agents for general games and analyze the equilibria induced between the users in three classes of games. We show that, generally, users have incentives to misreport their parameters to their own agents, and that such strategic user behavior can lead to very different outcomes than those anticipated by standard analysis.

How to improve discriminative feature learning is central in classification. Existing works address this problem by explicitly increasing inter-class separability and intra-class similarity, whether by constructing positive and negative pairs for contrastive learning or posing tighter class separating margins. These methods do not exploit the similarity between different classes as they adhere to i.i.d. assumption in data. In this paper, we embrace the real-world data distribution setting that some classes share semantic overlaps due to their similar appearances or concepts. Regarding this hypothesis, we propose a novel regularization to improve discriminative learning. We first calibrate the estimated highest likelihood of one sample based on its semantically neighboring classes, then encourage the overall likelihood predictions to be deterministic by imposing an adaptive exponential penalty. As the gradient of the proposed method is roughly proportional to the uncertainty of the predicted likelihoods, we name it adaptive discriminative regularization (ADR), trained along with a standard cross entropy loss in classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it can yield consistent and non-trivial performance improvements in a variety of visual classification tasks (over 10 benchmarks). Furthermore, we find it is robust to long-tailed and noisy label data distribution. Its flexible design enables its compatibility with mainstream classification architectures and losses.

We present a self-supervised and self-calibrating multi-shot approach to imaging through atmospheric turbulence, called TurbuGAN. Our approach requires no paired training data, adapts itself to the distribution of the turbulence, leverages domain-specific data priors, and can generalize from tens to thousands of measurements. We achieve such functionality through an adversarial sensing framework adapted from CryoGAN, which uses a discriminator network to match the distributions of captured and simulated measurements. Our framework builds on CryoGAN by (1) generalizing the forward measurement model to incorporate physically accurate and computationally efficient models for light propagation through anisoplanatic turbulence, (2) enabling adaptation to slightly misspecified forward models, and (3) leveraging domain-specific prior knowledge using pretrained generative networks, when available. We validate TurbuGAN on both computationally simulated and experimentally captured images distorted with anisoplanatic turbulence.

Object detection in autonomous driving applications implies that the detection and tracking of semantic objects are commonly native to urban driving environments, as pedestrians and vehicles. One of the major challenges in state-of-the-art deep-learning based object detection is false positive which occurrences with overconfident scores. This is highly undesirable in autonomous driving and other critical robotic-perception domains because of safety concerns. This paper proposes an approach to alleviate the problem of overconfident predictions by introducing a novel probabilistic layer to deep object detection networks in testing. The suggested approach avoids the traditional Sigmoid or Softmax prediction layer which often produces overconfident predictions. It is demonstrated that the proposed technique reduces overconfidence in the false positives without degrading the performance on the true positives. The approach is validated on the 2D-KITTI objection detection through the YOLOV4 and SECOND (Lidar-based detector). The proposed approach enables enabling interpretable probabilistic predictions without the requirement of re-training the network and therefore is very practical.

Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem is weighting, where data is weighted by a density ratio between the probability of actions given contexts in the target and logged policies. In practice, two issues often arise. First, many problems have very large action spaces and we may not observe rewards for most actions, and so in finite samples we may encounter a positivity violation. Second, many recommendation systems are not probabilistic and so having access to logging and target policy densities may not be feasible. To address these issues, we introduce the featurized embedded permutation weighting estimator. The estimator computes the density ratio in an action embedding space, which reduces the possibility of positivity violations. The density ratio is computed leveraging recent advances in normalizing flows and density ratio estimation as a classification problem, in order to obtain estimates which are feasible in practice.

Storage-efficient privacy-preserving learning is crucial due to the increasing amounts of sensitive user data required for modern learning tasks. We propose a framework for reducing the storage cost of user data while at the same time providing privacy guarantees, without essential loss in the utility of the data for learning. Our method comprises noise injection followed by lossy compression. We show that, when appropriately matching the lossy compression to the distribution of the added noise, the compressed examples converge, in distribution, to that of the noise-free training data as the sample size of the training data (or the dimension of the training data) increases. In this sense, the utility of the data for learning is essentially maintained, while reducing storage and privacy leakage by quantifiable amounts. We present experimental results on the CelebA dataset for gender classification and find that our suggested pipeline delivers in practice on the promise of the theory: the individuals in the images are unrecognizable (or less recognizable, depending on the noise level), overall storage of the data is substantially reduced, with no essential loss (and in some cases a slight boost) to the classification accuracy. As an added bonus, our experiments suggest that our method yields a substantial boost to robustness in the face of adversarial test data.

There exist several methods that aim to address the crucial task of understanding the behaviour of AI/ML models. Arguably, the most popular among them are local explanations that focus on investigating model behaviour for individual instances. Several methods have been proposed for local analysis, but relatively lesser effort has gone into understanding if the explanations are robust and accurately reflect the behaviour of underlying models. In this work, we present a survey of the works that analysed the robustness of two classes of local explanations (feature importance and counterfactual explanations) that are popularly used in analysing AI/ML models in finance. The survey aims to unify existing definitions of robustness, introduces a taxonomy to classify different robustness approaches, and discusses some interesting results. Finally, the survey introduces some pointers about extending current robustness analysis approaches so as to identify reliable explainability methods.

Energy storage resources must consider both price uncertainties and their physical operating characteristics when participating in wholesale electricity markets. This is a challenging problem as electricity prices are highly volatile, and energy storage has efficiency losses, power, and energy constraints. This paper presents a novel, versatile, and transferable approach combining model-based optimization with a convolutional long short-term memory network for energy storage to respond to or bid into wholesale electricity markets. We apply transfer learning to the ConvLSTM network to quickly adapt the trained bidding model to new market environments. We test our proposed approach using historical prices from New York State, showing it achieves state-of-the-art results, achieving between 70% to near 90% profit ratio compared to perfect foresight cases, in both price response and wholesale market bidding setting with various energy storage durations. We also test a transfer learning approach by pre-training the bidding model using New York data and applying it to arbitrage in Queensland, Australia. The result shows transfer learning achieves exceptional arbitrage profitability with as little as three days of local training data, demonstrating its significant advantage over training from scratch in scenarios with very limited data availability.

Data-centric AI has shed light on the significance of data within the machine learning (ML) pipeline. Acknowledging its importance, various research and policies are suggested by academia, industry, and government departments. Although the capability of utilizing existing data is essential, the capability to build a dataset has become more important than ever. In consideration of this trend, we propose a "Data Management Operation and Recipes" that will guide the industry regardless of the task or domain. In other words, this paper presents the concept of DMOps derived from real-world experience. By offering a baseline for building data, we want to help the industry streamline its data operation optimally.

Recently, we have been witnesses of accidents involving autonomous vehicles and their lack of sufficient information. One way to tackle this issue is to benefit from the perception of different view points, namely cooperative perception. We propose here a decentralized collaboration, i.e. peer-to-peer, in which the agents are active in their quest for full perception by asking for specific areas in their surroundings on which they would like to know more. Ultimately, we want to optimize a trade-off between the maximization of knowledge about moving objects and the minimization of the total volume of information received from others, to limit communication costs and message processing time. For this, we propose a way to learn a communication policy that reverses the usual communication paradigm by only requesting from other vehicles what is unknown to the ego-vehicle, instead of filtering on the sender side. We tested three different generative models to be taken as base for a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm, and compared them to a broadcasting policy and a policy randomly selecting areas. In particular, we propose Locally Predictable VAE (LP-VAE), which appears to be producing better belief states for predictions than state-of-the-art models, both as a standalone model and in the context of DRL. Experiments were conducted in the driving simulator CARLA. Our best models reached on average a gain of 25% of the total complementary information, while only requesting about 5% of the ego-vehicle's perceptual field. This trade-off is adjustable through the interpretable hyperparameters of our reward function.

Recently, grant-free transmission paradigm has been introduced for massive Internet of Things (IoT) networks to save both time and bandwidth and transmit the message with low latency. In order to accurately decode the message of each device at the base station (BS), first, the active devices at each transmission frame must be identified. In this work, first we investigate the problem of activity detection as a threshold comparing problem. We show the convexity of the activity detection method through analyzing its probability of error which makes it possible to find the optimal threshold for minimizing the activity detection error. Consequently, to achieve an optimum solution, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based method called convolutional neural network (CNN)-activity detection (AD). In order to make it more practical, we consider unknown and time-varying activity rate for the IoT devices. Our simulations verify that our proposed CNN-AD method can achieve higher performance compared to the existing non-Bayesian greedy-based methods. This is while existing methods need to know the activity rate of IoT devices, while our method works for unknown and even time-varying activity rates

Practitioners use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in different problems for about sixty years. Besides, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are an alternative to HMMs and appear in the literature as different and somewhat concurrent models. We propose two contributions. First, we show that basic Linear-Chain CRFs (LC-CRFs), considered as different from the HMMs, are in fact equivalent to them in the sense that for each LC-CRF there exists a HMM - that we specify - whom posterior distribution is identical to the given LC-CRF. Second, we show that it is possible to reformulate the generative Bayesian classifiers Maximum Posterior Mode (MPM) and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) used in HMMs, as discriminative ones. The last point is of importance in many fields, especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP), as it shows that in some situations dropping HMMs in favor of CRFs was not necessary.

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational inference is now the preferred choice for many high-dimensional models and large datasets. This tutorial introduces variational inference from the parametric perspective that dominates these recent developments, in contrast to the mean-field perspective commonly found in other introductory texts.

Although deep learning has made remarkable progress in processing various types of data such as images, text and speech, they are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations: perturbations specifically designed and added to the input to make the target model produce erroneous output. Most of the existing studies on generating adversarial perturbations attempt to perturb the entire input indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose ExploreADV, a general and flexible adversarial attack system that is capable of modeling regional and imperceptible attacks, allowing users to explore various kinds of adversarial examples as needed. We adapt and combine two existing boundary attack methods, DeepFool and Brendel\&Bethge Attack, and propose a mask-constrained adversarial attack system, which generates minimal adversarial perturbations under the pixel-level constraints, namely ``mask-constraints''. We study different ways of generating such mask-constraints considering the variance and importance of the input features, and show that our adversarial attack system offers users good flexibility to focus on sub-regions of inputs, explore imperceptible perturbations and understand the vulnerability of pixels/regions to adversarial attacks. We demonstrate our system to be effective based on extensive experiments and user study.

Credit scoring models are the primary instrument used by financial institutions to manage credit risk. The scarcity of research on behavioral scoring is due to the difficult data access. Financial institutions have to maintain the privacy and security of borrowers' information refrain them from collaborating in research initiatives. In this work, we present a methodology that allows us to evaluate the performance of models trained with synthetic data when they are applied to real-world data. Our results show that synthetic data quality is increasingly poor when the number of attributes increases. However, creditworthiness assessment models trained with synthetic data show a reduction of 3\% of AUC and 6\% of KS when compared with models trained with real data. These results have a significant impact since they encourage credit risk investigation from synthetic data, making it possible to maintain borrowers' privacy and to address problems that until now have been hampered by the availability of information.

Here, we demonstrate how machine learning enables the prediction of comonomers reactivity ratios based on the molecular structure of monomers. We combined multi-task learning, multi-inputs, and Graph Attention Network to build a model capable of predicting reactivity ratios based on the monomers chemical structures.

The advances in remote sensing technologies have boosted applications for Earth observation. These technologies provide multiple observations or views with different levels of information. They might contain static or temporary views with different levels of resolution, in addition to having different types and amounts of noise due to sensor calibration or deterioration. A great variety of deep learning models have been applied to fuse the information from these multiple views, known as deep multi-view or multi-modal fusion learning. However, the approaches in the literature vary greatly since different terminology is used to refer to similar concepts or different illustrations are given to similar techniques. This article gathers works on multi-view fusion for Earth observation by focusing on the common practices and approaches used in the literature. We summarize and structure insights from several different publications concentrating on unifying points and ideas. In this manuscript, we provide a harmonized terminology while at the same time mentioning the various alternative terms that are used in literature. The topics covered by the works reviewed focus on supervised learning with the use of neural network models. We hope this review, with a long list of recent references, can support future research and lead to a unified advance in the area.

With the development of technology and sharing economy, Airbnb as a famous short-term rental platform, has become the first choice for many young people to select. The issue of Airbnb's pricing has always been a problem worth studying. While the previous studies achieve promising results, there are exists deficiencies to solve. Such as, (1) the feature attributes of rental are not rich enough; (2) the research on rental text information is not deep enough; (3) there are few studies on predicting the rental price combined with the point of interest(POI) around the house. To address the above challenges, we proposes a multi-source information embedding(MSIE) model to predict the rental price of Airbnb. Specifically, we first selects the statistical feature to embed the original rental data. Secondly, we generates the word feature vector and emotional score combination of three different text information to form the text feature embedding. Thirdly, we uses the points of interest(POI) around the rental house information generates a variety of spatial network graphs, and learns the embedding of the network to obtain the spatial feature embedding. Finally, this paper combines the three modules into multi source rental representations, and uses the constructed fully connected neural network to predict the price. The analysis of the experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed model.

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has access to full information about the environment. We remove this assumption by developing an algorithm for IRL in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We address two limitations of existing IRL techniques. First, they require an excessive amount of data due to the information asymmetry between the expert and the learner. Second, most of these IRL techniques require solving the computationally intractable forward problem -- computing an optimal policy given a reward function -- in POMDPs. The developed algorithm reduces the information asymmetry while increasing the data efficiency by incorporating task specifications expressed in temporal logic into IRL. Such specifications may be interpreted as side information available to the learner a priori in addition to the demonstrations. Further, the algorithm avoids a common source of algorithmic complexity by building on causal entropy as the measure of the likelihood of the demonstrations as opposed to entropy. Nevertheless, the resulting problem is nonconvex due to the so-called forward problem. We solve the intrinsic nonconvexity of the forward problem in a scalable manner through a sequential linear programming scheme that guarantees to converge to a locally optimal policy. In a series of examples, including experiments in a high-fidelity Unity simulator, we demonstrate that even with a limited amount of data and POMDPs with tens of thousands of states, our algorithm learns reward functions and policies that satisfy the task while inducing similar behavior to the expert by leveraging the provided side information.

The offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem is often motivated by the need to learn data-driven decision policies in financial, legal and healthcare applications. However, the learned policy could retain sensitive information of individuals in the training data (e.g., treatment and outcome of patients), thus susceptible to various privacy risks. We design offline RL algorithms with differential privacy guarantees which provably prevent such risks. These algorithms also enjoy strong instance-dependent learning bounds under both tabular and linear Markov decision process (MDP) settings. Our theory and simulation suggest that the privacy guarantee comes at (almost) no drop in utility comparing to the non-private counterpart for a medium-size dataset.

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs), as the backbone of graph-based machine learning, demonstrate great success in various domains (e.g., e-commerce). However, the performance of GNNs is usually unsatisfactory due to the highly sparse and irregular graph-based operations. To this end, we propose, TC-GNN, the first GPU Tensor Core Unit (TCU) based GNN acceleration framework. The core idea is to reconcile the "Sparse" GNN computation with "Dense" TCU. Specifically, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the sparse operations in mainstream GNN computing frameworks. We introduce a novel sparse graph translation technique to facilitate TCU processing of sparse GNN workload. We also implement an effective CUDA core and TCU collaboration design to fully utilize GPU resources. We fully integrate TC-GNN with the Pytorch framework for ease of programming. Rigorous experiments show an average of 1.70X speedup over the state-of-the-art Deep Graph Library framework across various GNN models and dataset settings.

Existing automated techniques for software documentation typically attempt to reason between two main sources of information: code and natural language. However, this reasoning process is often complicated by the lexical gap between more abstract natural language and more structured programming languages. One potential bridge for this gap is the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as GUIs inherently encode salient information about underlying program functionality into rich, pixel-based data representations. This paper offers one of the first comprehensive empirical investigations into the connection between GUIs and functional, natural language descriptions of software. First, we collect, analyze, and open source a large dataset of functional GUI descriptions consisting of 45,998 descriptions for 10,204 screenshots from popular Android applications. The descriptions were obtained from human labelers and underwent several quality control mechanisms. To gain insight into the representational potential of GUIs, we investigate the ability of four Neural Image Captioning models to predict natural language descriptions of varying granularity when provided a screenshot as input. We evaluate these models quantitatively, using common machine translation metrics, and qualitatively through a large-scale user study. Finally, we offer learned lessons and a discussion of the potential shown by multimodal models to enhance future techniques for automated software documentation.

Gridded satellite precipitation datasets are useful in hydrological applications as they cover large regions with high density. However, they are not accurate in the sense that they do not agree with ground-based measurements. An established means for improving their accuracy is to correct them by adopting machine learning algorithms. The problem is defined as a regression setting, in which the ground-based measurements have the role of the dependent variable and the satellite data are the predictor variables, together with topography factors (e.g., elevation). Most studies of this kind involve a limited number of machine learning algorithms, and are conducted at a small region and for a limited time period. Thus, the results obtained through them are of local importance and do not provide more general guidance and best practices. To provide results that are generalizable and to contribute to the delivery of best practices, we here compare eight state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms in correcting satellite precipitation data for the entire contiguous United States and for a 15-year period. We use monthly data from the PERSIANN (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks) gridded dataset, together with monthly earth-observed precipitation data from the Global Historical Climatology Network monthly database, version 2 (GHCNm). The results suggest that extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and random forests are the most accurate in terms of the squared error scoring function. The remaining algorithms can be ordered as follows from the best to the worst ones: Bayesian regularized feed-forward neural networks, multivariate adaptive polynomial splines (poly-MARS), gradient boosting machines (gbm), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), feed-forward neural networks and linear regression.

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one iteratively improves a parameterized policy with stochastic policy gradient (PG) updates. In tabular Markov Decision Problems (MDPs), under persistent exploration and suitable parameterization, global optimality may be obtained. By contrast, in continuous space, the non-convexity poses a pathological challenge as evidenced by existing convergence results being mostly limited to stationarity or arbitrary local extrema. To close this gap, we step towards persistent exploration in continuous space through policy parameterizations defined by distributions of heavier tails defined by tail-index parameter alpha, which increases the likelihood of jumping in state space. Doing so invalidates smoothness conditions of the score function common to PG. Thus, we establish how the convergence rate to stationarity depends on the policy's tail index alpha, a Holder continuity parameter, integrability conditions, and an exploration tolerance parameter introduced here for the first time. Further, we characterize the dependence of the set of local maxima on the tail index through an exit and transition time analysis of a suitably defined Markov chain, identifying that policies associated with Levy Processes of a heavier tail converge to wider peaks. This phenomenon yields improved stability to perturbations in supervised learning, which we corroborate also manifests in improved performance of policy search, especially when myopic and farsighted incentives are misaligned.

Merging satellite products and ground-based measurements is often required for obtaining precipitation datasets that simultaneously cover large regions with high density and are more accurate than pure satellite precipitation products. Machine and statistical learning regression algorithms are regularly utilized in this endeavour. At the same time, tree-based ensemble algorithms for regression are adopted in various fields for solving algorithmic problems with high accuracy and low computational cost. The latter can constitute a crucial factor for selecting algorithms for satellite precipitation product correction at the daily and finer time scales, where the size of the datasets is particularly large. Still, information on which tree-based ensemble algorithm to select in such a case for the contiguous United States (US) is missing from the literature. In this work, we conduct an extensive comparison between three tree-based ensemble algorithms, specifically random forests, gradient boosting machines (gbm) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), in the context of interest. We use daily data from the PERSIANN (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks) and the IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM) gridded datasets. We also use earth-observed precipitation data from the Global Historical Climatology Network daily (GHCNd) database. The experiments refer to the entire contiguous US and additionally include the application of the linear regression algorithm for benchmarking purposes. The results suggest that XGBoost is the best-performing tree-based ensemble algorithm among those compared. They also suggest that IMERG is more useful than PERSIANN in the context investigated.

Counterfactual inference is a powerful tool, capable of solving challenging problems in high-profile sectors. To perform counterfactual inference, one requires knowledge of the underlying causal mechanisms. However, causal mechanisms cannot be uniquely determined from observations and interventions alone. This raises the question of how to choose the causal mechanisms so that resulting counterfactual inference is trustworthy in a given domain. This question has been addressed in causal models with binary variables, but the case of categorical variables remains unanswered. We address this challenge by introducing for causal models with categorical variables the notion of counterfactual ordering, a principle that posits desirable properties causal mechanisms should posses, and prove that it is equivalent to specific functional constraints on the causal mechanisms. To learn causal mechanisms satisfying these constraints, and perform counterfactual inference with them, we introduce deep twin networks. These are deep neural networks that, when trained, are capable of twin network counterfactual inference -- an alternative to the abduction, action, & prediction method. We empirically test our approach on diverse real-world and semi-synthetic data from medicine, epidemiology, and finance, reporting accurate estimation of counterfactual probabilities while demonstrating the issues that arise with counterfactual reasoning when counterfactual ordering is not enforced.

The accurate representation of precipitation in Earth system models (ESMs) is crucial for reliable projections of the ecological and socioeconomic impacts in response to anthropogenic global warming. The complex cross-scale interactions of processes that produce precipitation are challenging to model, however, inducing potentially strong biases in ESM fields, especially regarding extremes. State-of-the-art bias correction methods only address errors in the simulated frequency distributions locally, at every individual grid cell. Improving unrealistic spatial patterns of the ESM output, which would require spatial context, has not been possible so far. Here, we show that a post-processing method based on physically constrained generative adversarial networks (GANs) can correct biases of a state-of-the-art, CMIP6-class ESM both in local frequency distributions and in the spatial patterns at once. While our method improves local frequency distributions equally well as gold-standard bias-adjustment frameworks it strongly outperforms any existing methods in the correction of spatial patterns, especially in terms of the characteristic spatial intermittency of precipitation extremes.

A recent study has shown a phenomenon called neural collapse in that the within-class means of features and the classifier weight vectors converge to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame at the terminal phase of training for classification. In this paper, we explore the corresponding structures of the last-layer feature centers and classifiers in semantic segmentation. Based on our empirical and theoretical analysis, we point out that semantic segmentation naturally brings contextual correlation and imbalanced distribution among classes, which breaks the equiangular and maximally separated structure of neural collapse for both feature centers and classifiers. However, such a symmetric structure is beneficial to discrimination for the minor classes. To preserve these advantages, we introduce a regularizer on feature centers to encourage the network to learn features closer to the appealing structure in imbalanced semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvements on both 2D and 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks. Moreover, our method ranks 1st and sets a new record (+6.8% mIoU) on the ScanNet200 test leaderboard. Code will be available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Imbalanced-Learning.

Successful implementation of oil spill segmentation in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is vital for marine environmental protection. In this paper, we develop an effective segmentation framework named DGNet, which performs oil spill segmentation by incorporating the intrinsic distribution of backscatter values in SAR images. Specifically, our proposed segmentation network is constructed with two deep neural modules running in an interactive manner, where one is the inference module to achieve latent feature variable inference from SAR images, and the other is the generative module to produce oil spill segmentation maps by drawing the latent feature variables as inputs. Thus, to yield accurate segmentation, we take into account the intrinsic distribution of backscatter values in SAR images and embed it in our segmentation model. The intrinsic distribution originates from SAR imagery, describing the physical characteristics of oil spills. In the training process, the formulated intrinsic distribution guides efficient learning of optimal latent feature variable inference for oil spill segmentation. The efficient learning enables the training of our proposed DGNet with a small amount of image data. This is economically beneficial to oil spill segmentation where the availability of oil spill SAR image data is limited in practice. Additionally, benefiting from optimal latent feature variable inference, our proposed DGNet performs accurate oil spill segmentation. We evaluate the segmentation performance of our proposed DGNet with different metrics, and experimental evaluations demonstrate its effective segmentations.  ( 2 min )

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is widely utilized in real-world applications to enable collaborative learning while protecting data privacy and safety. However, previous works show that parties without labels (passive parties) in VFL can infer the sensitive label information owned by the party with labels (active party) or execute backdoor attacks to VFL. Meanwhile, active party can also infer sensitive feature information from passive party. All these pose new privacy and security challenges to VFL systems. We propose a new general defense method which limits the mutual information between private raw data, including both features and labels, and intermediate outputs to achieve a better trade-off between model utility and privacy. We term this defense Mutual Information Regularization Defense (MID). We theoretically and experimentally testify the effectiveness of our MID method in defending existing attacks in VFL, including label inference attacks, backdoor attacks and feature reconstruction attacks.  ( 2 min )

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.  ( 2 min )

Knowledge graphs (KG) have served as the key component of various natural language processing applications. Commonsense knowledge graphs (CKG) are a special type of KG, where entities and relations are composed of free-form text. However, previous works in KG completion and CKG completion suffer from long-tail relations and newly-added relations which do not have many know triples for training. In light of this, few-shot KG completion (FKGC), which requires the strengths of graph representation learning and few-shot learning, has been proposed to challenge the problem of limited annotated data. In this paper, we comprehensively survey previous attempts on such tasks in the form of a series of methods and applications. Specifically, we first introduce FKGC challenges, commonly used KGs, and CKGs. Then we systematically categorize and summarize existing works in terms of the type of KGs and the methods. Finally, we present applications of FKGC models on prediction tasks in different areas and share our thoughts on future research directions of FKGC.  ( 2 min )

Diffusion probabilistic models have generated high quality image synthesis recently. However, one pain point is the notorious inference to gradually obtain clear images with thousands of steps, which is time consuming compared to other generative models. In this paper, we present a shortcut MCMC sampling algorithm, which balances training and inference, while keeping the generated data's quality. In particular, we add the global fidelity constraint with shortcut MCMC sampling to combat the local fitting from diffusion models. We do some initial experiments and show very promising results. Our implementation is available at https://github.com//vividitytech/diffusion-mcmc.git.  ( 2 min )

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.  ( 2 min )

Benefiting from the intrinsic supervision information exploitation capability, contrastive learning has achieved promising performance in the field of deep graph clustering recently. However, we observe that two drawbacks of the positive and negative sample construction mechanisms limit the performance of existing algorithms from further improvement. 1) The quality of positive samples heavily depends on the carefully designed data augmentations, while inappropriate data augmentations would easily lead to the semantic drift and indiscriminative positive samples. 2) The constructed negative samples are not reliable for ignoring important clustering information. To solve these problems, we propose a Cluster-guided Contrastive deep Graph Clustering network (CCGC) by mining the intrinsic supervision information in the high-confidence clustering results. Specifically, instead of conducting complex node or edge perturbation, we construct two views of the graph by designing special Siamese encoders whose weights are not shared between the sibling sub-networks. Then, guided by the high-confidence clustering information, we carefully select and construct the positive samples from the same high-confidence cluster in two views. Moreover, to construct semantic meaningful negative sample pairs, we regard the centers of different high-confidence clusters as negative samples, thus improving the discriminative capability and reliability of the constructed sample pairs. Lastly, we design an objective function to pull close the samples from the same cluster while pushing away those from other clusters by maximizing and minimizing the cross-view cosine similarity between positive and negative samples. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCGC compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.  ( 2 min )

The decarbonization of buildings presents new challenges for the reliability of the electrical grid as a result of the intermittency of renewable energy sources and increase in grid load brought about by end-use electrification. To restore reliability, grid-interactive efficient buildings can provide flexibility services to the grid through demand response. Residential demand response programs are hindered by the need for manual intervention by customers. To maximize the energy flexibility potential of residential buildings, an advanced control architecture is needed. Reinforcement learning is well-suited for the control of flexible resources as it is able to adapt to unique building characteristics compared to expert systems. Yet, factors hindering the adoption of RL in real-world applications include its large data requirements for training, control security and generalizability. Here we address these challenges by proposing the MERLIN framework and using a digital twin of a real-world 17-building grid-interactive residential community in CityLearn. We show that 1) independent RL-controllers for batteries improve building and district level KPIs compared to a reference RBC by tailoring their policies to individual buildings, 2) despite unique occupant behaviours, transferring the RL policy of any one of the buildings to other buildings provides comparable performance while reducing the cost of training, 3) training RL-controllers on limited temporal data that does not capture full seasonality in occupant behaviour has little effect on performance. Although, the zero-net-energy (ZNE) condition of the buildings could be maintained or worsened as a result of controlled batteries, KPIs that are typically improved by ZNE condition (electricity price and carbon emissions) are further improved when the batteries are managed by an advanced controller.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, namely INVALIDATOR, to automatically assess the correctness of APR-generated patches via semantic and syntactic reasoning. INVALIDATOR reasons about program semantic via program invariants while it also captures program syntax via language semantic learned from large code corpus using the pre-trained language model. Given a buggy program and the developer-patched program, INVALIDATOR infers likely invariants on both programs. Then, INVALIDATOR determines that a APR-generated patch overfits if: (1) it violates correct specifications or (2) maintains errors behaviors of the original buggy program. In case our approach fails to determine an overfitting patch based on invariants, INVALIDATOR utilizes a trained model from labeled patches to assess patch correctness based on program syntax. The benefit of INVALIDATOR is three-fold. First, INVALIDATOR is able to leverage both semantic and syntactic reasoning to enhance its discriminant capability. Second, INVALIDATOR does not require new test cases to be generated but instead only relies on the current test suite and uses invariant inference to generalize the behaviors of a program. Third, INVALIDATOR is fully automated. We have conducted our experiments on a dataset of 885 patches generated on real-world programs in Defects4J. Experiment results show that INVALIDATOR correctly classified 79% overfitting patches, accounting for 23% more overfitting patches being detected by the best baseline. INVALIDATOR also substantially outperforms the best baselines by 14% and 19% in terms of Accuracy and F-Measure, respectively.  ( 2 min )

Decompilation aims to transform a low-level program language (LPL) (eg., binary file) into its functionally-equivalent high-level program language (HPL) (e.g., C/C++). It is a core technology in software security, especially in vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. In recent years, with the successful application of neural machine translation (NMT) models in natural language processing (NLP), researchers have tried to build neural decompilers by borrowing the idea of NMT. They formulate the decompilation process as a translation problem between LPL and HPL, aiming to reduce the human cost required to develop decompilation tools and improve their generalizability. However, state-of-the-art learning-based decompilers do not cope well with compiler-optimized binaries. Since real-world binaries are mostly compiler-optimized, decompilers that do not consider optimized binaries have limited practical significance. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based approach named NeurDP, that targets compiler-optimized binaries. NeurDP uses a graph neural network (GNN) model to convert LPL to an intermediate representation (IR), which bridges the gap between source code and optimized binary. We also design an Optimized Translation Unit (OTU) to split functions into smaller code fragments for better translation performance. Evaluation results on datasets containing various types of statements show that NeurDP can decompile optimized binaries with 45.21% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art neural decompilation frameworks.  ( 2 min )

Designing experiments often requires balancing between learning about the true treatment effects and earning from allocating more samples to the superior treatment. While optimal algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem (MABP) provide allocation policies that optimally balance learning and earning, they tend to be computationally expensive. The Gittins Index (GI) is a solution to the MABP that can simultaneously attain optimality and computationally efficiency goals, and it has been recently used in experiments with Bernoulli and Gaussian rewards. For the first time, we present a modification of the GI rule that can be used in experiments with exponentially-distributed rewards. We report its performance in simulated 2- armed and 3-armed experiments. Compared to traditional non-adaptive designs, our novel GI modified design shows operating characteristics comparable in learning (e.g. statistical power) but substantially better in earning (e.g. direct benefits). This illustrates the potential that designs using a GI approach to allocate participants have to improve participant benefits, increase efficiencies, and reduce experimental costs in adaptive multi-armed experiments with exponential rewards.  ( 2 min )

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.  ( 2 min )

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.  ( 2 min )

Despite significant progress in object categorization, in recent years, a number of important challenges remain; mainly, the ability to learn from limited labeled data and to recognize object classes within large, potentially open, set of labels. Zero-shot learning is one way of addressing these challenges, but it has only been shown to work with limited sized class vocabularies and typically requires separation between supervised and unsupervised classes, allowing former to inform the latter but not vice versa. We propose the notion of vocabulary-informed learning to alleviate the above mentioned challenges and address problems of supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and open set recognition using a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a weighted maximum margin framework for semantic manifold-based recognition that incorporates distance constraints from (both supervised and unsupervised) vocabulary atoms. Distance constraints ensure that labeled samples are projected closer to their correct prototypes, in the embedding space, than to others. We illustrate that resulting model shows improvements in supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot, and large open set recognition, with up to 310K class vocabulary on Animal with Attributes and ImageNet datasets.  ( 2 min )

Learning feature interactions is the key to success for the large-scale CTR prediction and recommendation. In practice, handcrafted feature engineering usually requires exhaustive searching. In order to reduce the high cost of human efforts in feature engineering, researchers propose several deep neural networks (DNN)-based approaches to learn the feature interactions in an end-to-end fashion. However, existing methods either do not learn both vector-wise interactions and bit-wise interactions simultaneously, or fail to combine them in a controllable manner. In this paper, we propose a new model, xDeepInt, based on a novel network architecture called polynomial interaction network (PIN) which learns higher-order vector-wise interactions recursively. By integrating subspace-crossing mechanism, we enable xDeepInt to balance the mixture of vector-wise and bit-wise feature interactions at a bounded order. Based on the network architecture, we customize a combined optimization strategy to conduct feature selection and interaction selection. We implement the proposed model and evaluate the model performance on three real-world datasets. Our experiment results demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of xDeepInt over state-of-the-art models. We open-source the TensorFlow implementation of xDeepInt: https://github.com/yanyachen/xDeepInt.  ( 2 min )

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.  ( 2 min )

As the accuracy of machine learning models increases at a fast rate, so does their demand for energy and compute resources. On a low level, the major part of these resources is consumed by data movement between different memory units. Modern hardware architectures contain a form of fast memory (e.g., cache, registers), which is small, and a slow memory (e.g., DRAM), which is larger but expensive to access. We can only process data that is stored in fast memory, which incurs data movement (input/output-operations, or I/Os) between the two units. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the I/Os needed in sparse feedforward neural network (FFNN) inference. We establish bounds that determine the optimal number of I/Os up to a factor of 2 and present a method that uses a number of I/Os within that range. Much of the I/O-complexity is determined by a few high-level properties of the FFNN (number of inputs, outputs, neurons, and connections), but if we want to get closer to the exact lower bound, the instance-specific sparsity patterns need to be considered. Departing from the 2-optimal computation strategy, we show how to reduce the number of I/Os further with simulated annealing. Complementing this result, we provide an algorithm that constructively generates networks with maximum I/O-efficiency for inference. We test the algorithms and empirically verify our theoretical and algorithmic contributions. In our experiments on real hardware we observe speedups of up to 45$\times$ relative to the standard way of performing inference.  ( 2 min )

Given the increasingly intricate forms of partial differential equations (PDEs) in physics and related fields, computationally solving PDEs without analytic solutions inevitably suffers from the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recent advances in neural operators, a kind of mesh-independent neural-network-based PDE solvers, have suggested the dawn of overcoming this challenge. In this emerging direction, Koopman neural operator (KNO) is a representative demonstration and outperforms other state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Here we present KoopmanLab, a self-contained and user-friendly PyTorch module of the Koopman neural operator family for solving partial differential equations. Beyond the original version of KNO, we develop multiple new variants of KNO based on different neural network architectures to improve the general applicability of our module. These variants are validated by mesh-independent and long-term prediction experiments implemented on representative PDEs (e.g., the Navier-Stokes equation and the Bateman-Burgers equation) and ERA5 (i.e., one of the largest high-resolution data sets of global-scale climate fields). These demonstrations suggest the potential of KoopmanLab to be considered in diverse applications of partial differential equations.  ( 2 min )

Application for semantic segmentation models in areas such as autonomous vehicles and human computer interaction require real-time predictive capabilities. The challenges of addressing real-time application is amplified by the need to operate on resource constrained hardware. Whilst development of real-time methods for these platforms has increased, these models are unable to sufficiently reason about uncertainty present. This paper addresses this by combining deep feature extraction from pre-trained models with Bayesian regression and moment propagation for uncertainty aware predictions. We demonstrate how the proposed method can yield meaningful uncertainty on embedded hardware in real-time whilst maintaining predictive performance.  ( 2 min )

Deep R Programming is a comprehensive course on one of the most popular languages in data science (statistical computing, graphics, machine learning, data wrangling and analytics). It introduces the base language in-depth and is aimed at ambitious students, practitioners, and researchers who would like to become independent users of this powerful environment. This textbook is a non-profit project. Its online and PDF versions are freely available at . This early draft is distributed in the hope that it will be useful.  ( 2 min )

We propose a distributionally robust return-risk model for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under risk and reward ambiguity. The proposed model optimizes the weighted average of mean and percentile performances, and it covers the distributionally robust MDPs and the distributionally robust chance-constrained MDPs (both under reward ambiguity) as special cases. By considering that the unknown reward distribution lies in a Wasserstein ambiguity set, we derive the tractable reformulation for our model. In particular, we show that that the return-risk model can also account for risk from uncertain transition kernel when one only seeks deterministic policies, and that a distributionally robust MDP under the percentile criterion can be reformulated as its nominal counterpart at an adjusted risk level. A scalable first-order algorithm is designed to solve large-scale problems, and we demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model and algorithm through numerical experiments.  ( 2 min )

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.  ( 2 min )

A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances have been made to overcome the challenges in causal effect estimation with observational data, such as missing counterfactual outcomes and selection bias between treatment and control groups, the existing methods mainly focus on source-specific and stationary observational data. Such learning strategies assume that all observational data are already available during the training phase and from only one source. This practical concern of accessibility is ubiquitous in various academic and industrial applications. That's what it boiled down to: in the era of big data, we face new challenges in causal inference with observational data, i.e., the extensibility for incrementally available observational data, the adaptability for extra domain adaptation problem except for the imbalance between treatment and control groups, and the accessibility for an enormous amount of data. In this position paper, we formally define the problem of continual treatment effect estimation, describe its research challenges, and then present possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, we will discuss future research directions on this topic.  ( 2 min )

Continual Learning (CL) is a field dedicated to devise algorithms able to achieve lifelong learning. Overcoming the knowledge disruption of previously acquired concepts, a drawback affecting deep learning models and that goes by the name of catastrophic forgetting, is a hard challenge. Currently, deep learning methods can attain impressive results when the data modeled does not undergo a considerable distributional shift in subsequent learning sessions, but whenever we expose such systems to this incremental setting, performance drop very quickly. Overcoming this limitation is fundamental as it would allow us to build truly intelligent systems showing stability and plasticity. Secondly, it would allow us to overcome the onerous limitation of retraining these architectures from scratch with the new updated data. In this thesis, we tackle the problem from multiple directions. In a first study, we show that in rehearsal-based techniques (systems that use memory buffer), the quantity of data stored in the rehearsal buffer is a more important factor over the quality of the data. Secondly, we propose one of the early works of incremental learning on ViTs architectures, comparing functional, weight and attention regularization approaches and propose effective novel a novel asymmetric loss. At the end we conclude with a study on pretraining and how it affects the performance in Continual Learning, raising some questions about the effective progression of the field. We then conclude with some future directions and closing remarks.  ( 2 min )

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.  ( 2 min )

We aim to bridge the gap between our common-sense few-sample human learning and large-data machine learning. We derive a theory of human-like few-shot learning from von-Neuman-Landauer's principle. modelling human learning is difficult as how people learn varies from one to another. Under commonly accepted definitions, we prove that all human or animal few-shot learning, and major models including Free Energy Principle and Bayesian Program Learning that model such learning, approximate our theory, under Church-Turing thesis. We find that deep generative model like variational autoencoder (VAE) can be used to approximate our theory and perform significantly better than baseline models including deep neural networks, for image recognition, low resource language processing, and character recognition.  ( 2 min )

We present the interpretable meta neural ordinary differential equation (iMODE) method to rapidly learn generalizable (i.e., not parameter-specific) dynamics from trajectories of multiple dynamical systems that vary in their physical parameters. The iMODE method learns meta-knowledge, the functional variations of the force field of dynamical system instances without knowing the physical parameters, by adopting a bi-level optimization framework: an outer level capturing the common force field form among studied dynamical system instances and an inner level adapting to individual system instances. A priori physical knowledge can be conveniently embedded in the neural network architecture as inductive bias, such as conservative force field and Euclidean symmetry. With the learned meta-knowledge, iMODE can model an unseen system within seconds, and inversely reveal knowledge on the physical parameters of a system, or as a Neural Gauge to "measure" the physical parameters of an unseen system with observed trajectories. We test the validity of the iMODE method on bistable, double pendulum, Van der Pol, Slinky, and reaction-diffusion systems.  ( 2 min )

Quadruped robots are currently used in industrial robotics as mechanical aid to automate several routine tasks. However, presently, the usage of such a robot in a domestic setting is still very much a part of the research. This paper discusses the understanding and virtual simulation of such a robot capable of detecting and understanding human emotions, generating its gait, and responding via sounds and expression on a screen. To this end, we use a combination of reinforcement learning and software engineering concepts to simulate a quadruped robot that can understand emotions, navigate through various terrains and detect sound sources, and respond to emotions using audio-visual feedback. This paper aims to establish the framework of simulating a quadruped robot that is emotionally intelligent and can primarily respond to audio-visual stimuli using motor or audio response. The emotion detection from the speech was not as performant as ERANNs or Zeta Policy learning, still managing an accuracy of 63.5%. The video emotion detection system produced results that are almost at par with the state of the art, with an accuracy of 99.66%. Due to its "on-policy" learning process, the PPO algorithm was extremely rapid to learn, allowing the simulated dog to demonstrate a remarkably seamless gait across the different cadences and variations. This enabled the quadruped robot to respond to generated stimuli, allowing us to conclude that it functions as predicted and satisfies the aim of this work.  ( 2 min )

Many recent works on understanding deep learning try to quantify how much individual data instances influence the optimization and generalization of a model, either by analyzing the behavior of the model during training or by measuring the performance gap of the model when the instance is removed from the dataset. Such approaches reveal characteristics and importance of individual instances, which may provide useful information in diagnosing and improving deep learning. However, most of the existing works on data valuation require actual training of a model, which often demands high-computational cost. In this paper, we provide a training-free data valuation score, called complexity-gap score, which is a data-centric score to quantify the influence of individual instances in generalization of two-layer overparameterized neural networks. The proposed score can quantify irregularity of the instances and measure how much each data instance contributes in the total movement of the network parameters during training. We theoretically analyze and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the complexity-gap score in finding 'irregular or mislabeled' data instances, and also provide applications of the score in analyzing datasets and diagnosing training dynamics.  ( 2 min )

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to a class of attacks called "backdoor attacks", which create an association between a backdoor trigger and a target label the attacker is interested in exploiting. A backdoored DNN performs well on clean test images, yet persistently predicts an attacker-defined label for any sample in the presence of the backdoor trigger. Although backdoor attacks have been extensively studied in the image domain, there are very few works that explore such attacks in the video domain, and they tend to conclude that image backdoor attacks are less effective in the video domain. In this work, we revisit the traditional backdoor threat model and incorporate additional video-related aspects to that model. We show that poisoned-label image backdoor attacks could be extended temporally in two ways, statically and dynamically, leading to highly effective attacks in the video domain. In addition, we explore natural video backdoors to highlight the seriousness of this vulnerability in the video domain. And, for the first time, we study multi-modal (audiovisual) backdoor attacks against video action recognition models, where we show that attacking a single modality is enough for achieving a high attack success rate.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse experiences in order to learn optimal policies often limits the application of RL techniques in safety-critical systems like vehicle control. In this paper, an exponential control barrier function (ECBF) is derived and utilized to filter unsafe actions proposed by an RL-based driver assistance system. The RL agent freely explores and optimizes the performance objectives while unsafe actions are projected to the closest actions in the safe domain. The reward is structured so that driver's acceleration requests are met in a manner that boosts fuel economy and doesn't compromise comfort. The optimal gear and traction torque control actions that maximize the cumulative reward are computed via the Maximum a Posteriori Policy Optimization (MPO) algorithm configured for a hybrid action space. The proposed safe-RL scheme is trained and evaluated in car following scenarios where it is shown that it effectively avoids collision both during training and evaluation while delivering on the expected fuel economy improvements for the driver assistance system.  ( 2 min )

Cataloging the complex behaviors of dynamical systems can be challenging, even when they are well-described by a simple mechanistic model. If such a system is of limited analytical tractability, brute force simulation is often the only resort. We present an alternative, optimization-driven approach using tools from machine learning. We apply this approach to a novel, fully-optimizable, reaction-diffusion model which incorporates complex chemical reaction networks (termed "Dense Reaction-Diffusion Network" or "Dense RDN"). This allows us to systematically identify new states and behaviors, including pattern formation, dissipation-maximizing nonequilibrium states, and replication-like dynamical structures.  ( 2 min )

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.  ( 2 min )

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.  ( 2 min )

Deep reinforcement learning has considerable potential to improve irrigation scheduling in many cropping systems by applying adaptive amounts of water based on various measurements over time. The goal is to discover an intelligent decision rule that processes information available to growers and prescribes sensible irrigation amounts for the time steps considered. Due to the technical novelty, however, the research on the technique remains sparse and impractical. To accelerate the progress, the paper proposes a general framework and actionable procedure that allow researchers to formulate their own optimisation problems and implement solution algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning. The effectiveness of the framework was demonstrated using a case study of irrigated wheat grown in a productive region of Australia where profits were maximised. Specifically, the decision rule takes nine state variable inputs: crop phenological stage, leaf area index, extractable soil water for each of the five top layers, cumulative rainfall and cumulative irrigation. It returns a probabilistic prescription over five candidate irrigation amounts (0, 10, 20, 30 and 40 mm) every day. The production system was simulated at Goondiwindi using the APSIM-Wheat crop model. After training in the learning environment using 1981--2010 weather data, the learned decision rule was tested individually for each year of 2011--2020. The results were compared against the benchmark profits obtained using irrigation schedules optimised individually for each of the considered years. The discovered decision rule prescribed daily irrigation amounts that achieved more than 96% of the benchmark profits. The framework is general and applicable to a wide range of cropping systems with realistic optimisation problems.  ( 2 min )

These notes were compiled as lecture notes for a course developed and taught at the University of the Southern California. They should be accessible to a typical engineering graduate student with a strong background in Applied Mathematics. The main objective of these notes is to introduce a student who is familiar with concepts in linear algebra and partial differential equations to select topics in deep learning. These lecture notes exploit the strong connections between deep learning algorithms and the more conventional techniques of computational physics to achieve two goals. First, they use concepts from computational physics to develop an understanding of deep learning algorithms. Not surprisingly, many concepts in deep learning can be connected to similar concepts in computational physics, and one can utilize this connection to better understand these algorithms. Second, several novel deep learning algorithms can be used to solve challenging problems in computational physics. Thus, they offer someone who is interested in modeling a physical phenomena with a complementary set of tools.  ( 2 min )

Deep Learning (DL) has achieved automatic and objective assessment of surgical skills. However, DL models are data-hungry and restricted to their training domain. This prevents them from transitioning to new tasks where data is limited. Hence, domain adaptation is crucial to implement DL in real life. Here, we propose a meta-learning model, A-VBANet, that can deliver domain-agnostic surgical skill classification via one-shot learning. We develop the A-VBANet on five laparoscopic and robotic surgical simulators. Additionally, we test it on operating room (OR) videos of laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Our model successfully adapts with accuracies up to 99.5% in one-shot and 99.9% in few-shot settings for simulated tasks and 89.7% for laparoscopic cholecystectomy. For the first time, we provide a domain-agnostic procedure for video-based assessment of surgical skills. A significant implication of this approach is that it allows the use of data from surgical simulators to assess performance in the operating room.  ( 2 min )

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.  ( 2 min )

Adversarial robustness assessment for video recognition models has raised concerns owing to their wide applications on safety-critical tasks. Compared with images, videos have much high dimension, which brings huge computational costs when generating adversarial videos. This is especially serious for the query-based black-box attacks where gradient estimation for the threat models is usually utilized, and high dimensions will lead to a large number of queries. To mitigate this issue, we propose to simultaneously eliminate the temporal and spatial redundancy within the video to achieve an effective and efficient gradient estimation on the reduced searching space, and thus query number could decrease. To implement this idea, we design the novel Adversarial spatial-temporal Focus (AstFocus) attack on videos, which performs attacks on the simultaneously focused key frames and key regions from the inter-frames and intra-frames in the video. AstFocus attack is based on the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework. One agent is responsible for selecting key frames, and another agent is responsible for selecting key regions. These two agents are jointly trained by the common rewards received from the black-box threat models to perform a cooperative prediction. By continuously querying, the reduced searching space composed of key frames and key regions is becoming precise, and the whole query number becomes less than that on the original video. Extensive experiments on four mainstream video recognition models and three widely used action recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed AstFocus attack outperforms the SOTA methods, which is prevenient in fooling rate, query number, time, and perturbation magnitude at the same.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a machine learning approach to multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), a class of latent factor models that can be used to model and predict student performance from observed assessment data. Inspired by collaborative filtering, we define a general class of models that includes many MIRT models. We discuss the use of penalized joint maximum likelihood (JML) to estimate individual models and cross-validation to select the best performing model. This model evaluation process can be optimized using batching techniques, such that even sparse large-scale data can be analyzed efficiently. We illustrate our approach with simulated and real data, including an example from a massive open online course (MOOC). The high-dimensional model fit to this large and sparse dataset does not lend itself well to traditional methods of factor interpretation. By analogy to recommender-system applications, we propose an alternative "validation" of the factor model, using auxiliary information about the popularity of items consulted during an open-book exam in the course.  ( 2 min )

Wind power forecasting helps with the planning for the power systems by contributing to having a higher level of certainty in decision-making. Due to the randomness inherent to meteorological events (e.g., wind speeds), making highly accurate long-term predictions for wind power can be extremely difficult. One approach to remedy this challenge is to utilize weather information from multiple points across a geographical grid to obtain a holistic view of the wind patterns, along with temporal information from the previous power outputs of the wind farms. Our proposed CNN-RNN architecture combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to extract spatial and temporal information from multi-dimensional input data to make day-ahead predictions. In this regard, our method incorporates an ultra-wide learning view, combining data from multiple numerical weather prediction models, wind farms, and geographical locations. Additionally, we experiment with global forecasting approaches to understand the impact of training the same model over the datasets obtained from multiple different wind farms, and we employ a method where spatial information extracted from convolutional layers is passed to a tree ensemble (e.g., Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM)) instead of fully connected layers. The results show that our proposed CNN-RNN architecture outperforms other models such as LGBM, Extra Tree regressor and linear regression when trained globally, but fails to replicate such performance when trained individually on each farm. We also observe that passing the spatial information from CNN to LGBM improves its performance, providing further evidence of CNN's spatial feature extraction capabilities.  ( 2 min )

This article charts the work of a 4 month project aimed at automatically identifying patterns of tweets popularity evolution using Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. To apprehend both the data and the extent of the problem, a straightforward clustering algorithm based on a point to point distance is used. Then, in an attempt to refine the algorithm, various analyses especially using feature extraction techniques are conducted. Although the algorithm eventually fails to automate such a task, this exercise raises a complex but necessary issue touching on the impact of virality on social networks.  ( 2 min )

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms are considered as a promising technique for next-generation communication networks due to their flexibility, mobility, low cost, and the ability to collaboratively and autonomously provide services. Distributed learning (DL) enables UAV swarms to intelligently provide communication services, multi-directional remote surveillance, and target tracking. In this survey, we first introduce several popular DL algorithms such as federated learning (FL), multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), distributed inference, and split learning, and present a comprehensive overview of their applications for UAV swarms, such as trajectory design, power control, wireless resource allocation, user assignment, perception, and satellite communications. Then, we present several state-of-the-art applications of UAV swarms in wireless communication systems, such us reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), virtual reality (VR), semantic communications, and discuss the problems and challenges that DL-enabled UAV swarms can solve in these applications. Finally, we describe open problems of using DL in UAV swarms and future research directions of DL enabled UAV swarms. In summary, this survey provides a comprehensive survey of various DL applications for UAV swarms in extensive scenarios.  ( 2 min )

Deploying reliable deep learning techniques in interdisciplinary applications needs learned models to output accurate and ({even more importantly}) explainable predictions. Existing approaches typically explicate network outputs in a post-hoc fashion, under an implicit assumption that faithful explanations come from accurate predictions/classifications. We have an opposite claim that explanations boost (or even determine) classification. That is, end-to-end learning of explanation factors to augment discriminative representation extraction could be a more intuitive strategy to inversely assure fine-grained explainability, e.g., in those neuroimaging and neuroscience studies with high-dimensional data containing noisy, redundant, and task-irrelevant information. In this paper, we propose such an explainable geometric deep network dubbed as NeuroExplainer, with applications to uncover altered infant cortical development patterns associated with preterm birth. Given fundamental cortical attributes as network input, our NeuroExplainer adopts a hierarchical attention-decoding framework to learn fine-grained attentions and respective discriminative representations to accurately recognize preterm infants from term-born infants at term-equivalent age. NeuroExplainer learns the hierarchical attention-decoding modules under subject-level weak supervision coupled with targeted regularizers deduced from domain knowledge regarding brain development. These prior-guided constraints implicitly maximizes the explainability metrics (i.e., fidelity, sparsity, and stability) in network training, driving the learned network to output detailed explanations and accurate classifications. Experimental results on the public dHCP benchmark suggest that NeuroExplainer led to quantitatively reliable explanation results that are qualitatively consistent with representative neuroimaging studies.  ( 2 min )

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on robust average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case average reward over an uncertainty set. We first take an approach that approximates average-reward MDPs using discounted MDPs. We prove that the robust discounted value function converges to the robust average-reward as the discount factor $\gamma$ goes to $1$, and moreover, when $\gamma$ is large, any optimal policy of the robust discounted MDP is also an optimal policy of the robust average-reward. We further design a robust dynamic programming approach, and theoretically characterize its convergence to the optimum. Then, we investigate robust average-reward MDPs directly without using discounted MDPs as an intermediate step. We derive the robust Bellman equation for robust average-reward MDPs, prove that the optimal policy can be derived from its solution, and further design a robust relative value iteration algorithm that provably finds its solution, or equivalently, the optimal robust policy.  ( 2 min )

Proteins are fundamental biological entities that play a key role in life activities. The amino acid sequences of proteins can be folded into stable 3D structures in the real physicochemical world, forming a special kind of sequence-structure data. With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, Protein Representation Learning (PRL) has recently emerged as a promising research topic for extracting informative knowledge from massive protein sequences or structures. To pave the way for AI researchers with little bioinformatics background, we present a timely and comprehensive review of PRL formulations and existing PRL methods from the perspective of model architectures, pretext tasks, and downstream applications. We first briefly introduce the motivations for protein representation learning and formulate it in a general and unified framework. Next, we divide existing PRL methods into three main categories: sequence-based, structure-based, and sequence-structure co-modeling. Finally, we discuss some technical challenges and potential directions for improving protein representation learning. The latest advances in PRL methods are summarized in a GitHub repository https://github.com/LirongWu/awesome-protein-representation-learning.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we study a sequential decision-making problem, called Adaptive Sampling for Discovery (ASD). Starting with a large unlabeled dataset, algorithms for ASD adaptively label the points with the goal to maximize the sum of responses. This problem has wide applications to real-world discovery problems, for example drug discovery with the help of machine learning models. ASD algorithms face the well-known exploration-exploitation dilemma. The algorithm needs to choose points that yield information to improve model estimates but it also needs to exploit the model. We rigorously formulate the problem and propose a general information-directed sampling (IDS) algorithm. We provide theoretical guarantees for the performance of IDS in linear, graph and low-rank models. The benefits of IDS are shown in both simulation experiments and real-data experiments for discovering chemical reaction conditions.  ( 2 min )

The offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem is often motivated by the need to learn data-driven decision policies in financial, legal and healthcare applications. However, the learned policy could retain sensitive information of individuals in the training data (e.g., treatment and outcome of patients), thus susceptible to various privacy risks. We design offline RL algorithms with differential privacy guarantees which provably prevent such risks. These algorithms also enjoy strong instance-dependent learning bounds under both tabular and linear Markov decision process (MDP) settings. Our theory and simulation suggest that the privacy guarantee comes at (almost) no drop in utility comparing to the non-private counterpart for a medium-size dataset.  ( 2 min )

Crowdsourcing system has emerged as an effective platform for labeling data with relatively low cost by using non-expert workers. Inferring correct labels from multiple noisy answers on data, however, has been a challenging problem, since the quality of the answers varies widely across tasks and workers. Many existing works have assumed that there is a fixed ordering of workers in terms of their skill levels, and focused on estimating worker skills to aggregate the answers from workers with different weights. In practice, however, the worker skill changes widely across tasks, especially when the tasks are heterogeneous. In this paper, we consider a new model, called $d$-type specialization model, in which each task and worker has its own (unknown) type and the reliability of each worker can vary in the type of a given task and that of a worker. We allow that the number $d$ of types can scale in the number of tasks. In this model, we characterize the optimal sample complexity to correctly infer the labels within any given accuracy, and propose label inference algorithms achieving the order-wise optimal limit even when the types of tasks or those of workers are unknown. We conduct experiments both on synthetic and real datasets, and show that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms developed based on more strict model assumptions.  ( 2 min )

Gaussian graphical models provide a powerful framework for uncovering conditional dependence relationships between sets of nodes; they have found applications in a wide variety of fields including sensor and communication networks, physics, finance, and computational biology. Often, one observes data on the nodes and the task is to learn the graph structure, or perform graphical model selection. While this is a well-studied problem with many popular techniques, there are typically three major practical challenges: i) many existing algorithms become computationally intractable in huge-data settings with tens of thousands of nodes; ii) the need for separate data-driven hyperparameter tuning considerably adds to the computational burden; iii) the statistical accuracy of selected edges often deteriorates as the dimension and/or the complexity of the underlying graph structures increase. We tackle these problems by developing the novel Minipatch Graph (MPGraph) estimator. Our approach breaks up the huge graph learning problem into many smaller problems by creating an ensemble of tiny random subsets of both the observations and the nodes, termed minipatches. We then leverage recent advances that use hard thresholding to solve the latent variable graphical model problem to consistently learn the graph on each minipatch. Our approach is computationally fast, embarrassingly parallelizable, memory efficient, and has integrated stability-based hyperparamter tuning. Additionally, we prove that under weaker assumptions than that of the Graphical Lasso, our MPGraph estimator achieves graph selection consistency. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art computational approaches for Gaussian graphical model selection including the BigQUIC algorithm, and empirically demonstrate that our approach is not only more statistically accurate but also extensively faster for huge graph learning problems.  ( 3 min )

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one iteratively improves a parameterized policy with stochastic policy gradient (PG) updates. In tabular Markov Decision Problems (MDPs), under persistent exploration and suitable parameterization, global optimality may be obtained. By contrast, in continuous space, the non-convexity poses a pathological challenge as evidenced by existing convergence results being mostly limited to stationarity or arbitrary local extrema. To close this gap, we step towards persistent exploration in continuous space through policy parameterizations defined by distributions of heavier tails defined by tail-index parameter alpha, which increases the likelihood of jumping in state space. Doing so invalidates smoothness conditions of the score function common to PG. Thus, we establish how the convergence rate to stationarity depends on the policy's tail index alpha, a Holder continuity parameter, integrability conditions, and an exploration tolerance parameter introduced here for the first time. Further, we characterize the dependence of the set of local maxima on the tail index through an exit and transition time analysis of a suitably defined Markov chain, identifying that policies associated with Levy Processes of a heavier tail converge to wider peaks. This phenomenon yields improved stability to perturbations in supervised learning, which we corroborate also manifests in improved performance of policy search, especially when myopic and farsighted incentives are misaligned.  ( 2 min )

Learning feature interactions is the key to success for the large-scale CTR prediction and recommendation. In practice, handcrafted feature engineering usually requires exhaustive searching. In order to reduce the high cost of human efforts in feature engineering, researchers propose several deep neural networks (DNN)-based approaches to learn the feature interactions in an end-to-end fashion. However, existing methods either do not learn both vector-wise interactions and bit-wise interactions simultaneously, or fail to combine them in a controllable manner. In this paper, we propose a new model, xDeepInt, based on a novel network architecture called polynomial interaction network (PIN) which learns higher-order vector-wise interactions recursively. By integrating subspace-crossing mechanism, we enable xDeepInt to balance the mixture of vector-wise and bit-wise feature interactions at a bounded order. Based on the network architecture, we customize a combined optimization strategy to conduct feature selection and interaction selection. We implement the proposed model and evaluate the model performance on three real-world datasets. Our experiment results demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of xDeepInt over state-of-the-art models. We open-source the TensorFlow implementation of xDeepInt: https://github.com/yanyachen/xDeepInt.  ( 2 min )

Classical asymptotic theory for statistical inference usually involves calibrating a statistic by fixing the dimension $d$ while letting the sample size $n$ increase to infinity. Recently, much effort has been dedicated towards understanding how these methods behave in high-dimensional settings, where $d$ and $n$ both increase to infinity together. This often leads to different inference procedures, depending on the assumptions about the dimensionality, leaving the practitioner in a bind: given a dataset with 100 samples in 20 dimensions, should they calibrate by assuming $n \gg d$, or $d/n \approx 0.2$? This paper considers the goal of dimension-agnostic inference; developing methods whose validity does not depend on any assumption on $d$ versus $n$. We introduce an approach that uses variational representations of existing test statistics along with sample splitting and self-normalization to produce a new test statistic with a Gaussian limiting distribution, regardless of how $d$ scales with $n$. The resulting statistic can be viewed as a careful modification of degenerate U-statistics, dropping diagonal blocks and retaining off-diagonal blocks. We exemplify our technique for some classical problems including one-sample mean and covariance testing, and show that our tests have minimax rate-optimal power against appropriate local alternatives. In most settings, our cross U-statistic matches the high-dimensional power of the corresponding (degenerate) U-statistic up to a $\sqrt{2}$ factor.  ( 2 min )

Practitioners use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in different problems for about sixty years. Besides, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are an alternative to HMMs and appear in the literature as different and somewhat concurrent models. We propose two contributions. First, we show that basic Linear-Chain CRFs (LC-CRFs), considered as different from the HMMs, are in fact equivalent to them in the sense that for each LC-CRF there exists a HMM - that we specify - whom posterior distribution is identical to the given LC-CRF. Second, we show that it is possible to reformulate the generative Bayesian classifiers Maximum Posterior Mode (MPM) and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) used in HMMs, as discriminative ones. The last point is of importance in many fields, especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP), as it shows that in some situations dropping HMMs in favor of CRFs was not necessary.  ( 2 min )

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational inference is now the preferred choice for many high-dimensional models and large datasets. This tutorial introduces variational inference from the parametric perspective that dominates these recent developments, in contrast to the mean-field perspective commonly found in other introductory texts.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.  ( 2 min )

Entropic regularization provides a generalization of the original optimal transport problem. It introduces a penalty term defined by the Kullback-Leibler divergence, making the problem more tractable via the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm. Replacing the Kullback-Leibler divergence with a general $f$-divergence leads to a natural generalization. The case of divergences defined by superlinear functions was recently studied by Di Marino and Gerolin. Using convex analysis, we extend the theory developed so far to include all $f$-divergences defined by functions of Legendre type, and prove that under some mild conditions, strong duality holds, optimums in both the primal and dual problems are attained, the generalization of the $c$-transform is well-defined, and we give sufficient conditions for the generalized Sinkhorn algorithm to converge to an optimal solution. We propose a practical algorithm for computing an approximate solution of the optimal transport problem with $f$-divergence regularization via the generalized Sinkhorn algorithm. Finally, we present experimental results on synthetic 2-dimensional data, demonstrating the effects of using different $f$-divergences for regularization, which influences convergence speed, numerical stability and sparsity of the optimal coupling.  ( 2 min )

A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances have been made to overcome the challenges in causal effect estimation with observational data, such as missing counterfactual outcomes and selection bias between treatment and control groups, the existing methods mainly focus on source-specific and stationary observational data. Such learning strategies assume that all observational data are already available during the training phase and from only one source. This practical concern of accessibility is ubiquitous in various academic and industrial applications. That's what it boiled down to: in the era of big data, we face new challenges in causal inference with observational data, i.e., the extensibility for incrementally available observational data, the adaptability for extra domain adaptation problem except for the imbalance between treatment and control groups, and the accessibility for an enormous amount of data. In this position paper, we formally define the problem of continual treatment effect estimation, describe its research challenges, and then present possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, we will discuss future research directions on this topic.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a machine learning approach to multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), a class of latent factor models that can be used to model and predict student performance from observed assessment data. Inspired by collaborative filtering, we define a general class of models that includes many MIRT models. We discuss the use of penalized joint maximum likelihood (JML) to estimate individual models and cross-validation to select the best performing model. This model evaluation process can be optimized using batching techniques, such that even sparse large-scale data can be analyzed efficiently. We illustrate our approach with simulated and real data, including an example from a massive open online course (MOOC). The high-dimensional model fit to this large and sparse dataset does not lend itself well to traditional methods of factor interpretation. By analogy to recommender-system applications, we propose an alternative "validation" of the factor model, using auxiliary information about the popularity of items consulted during an open-book exam in the course.  ( 2 min )

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.  ( 2 min )

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.  ( 2 min )

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Let's say an insanely powerful and high res music AI is released. It can create absolutely whatever you want. What would you ask it ? What would be your prompts ? submitted by /u/paulbismuth31 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

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I have been seeing a lot of AI generated avatars that are really cool and really accurate so I decided to try. I tried the tiktok one first and it looked actually nothing like me. I then downloaded the app wonder which allows you to upload 10 photos and get 100 pictures and a vast majority of them still didn't look like me. Have other people experienced this? Does anyone know reasons this might be? submitted by /u/dreyhitz27 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUi7v0eIPz4&lc=Ugxuw-xuUSYvVnbfjrV4AaABAg&ab_channel=ScaleAI submitted by /u/Spiritual-Ad4430 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

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Im a 17 yo in Singapore taking CS in JC, have a background in competitive programming in cpp, coded some discord bots and done some CTFs etc. When I look for online courses for AI devs they seem to be teaching how to use certain pre-built/trained models like tensor and pytorch etc. Would like to ask if any senior AI devs here start the same way (from online courses, basics of tensor/pytorch,..) or what are some better ways to start with AI dev? Also, is an AI's performance depends more on its code/model or the amount of training data? (as a solo-dev, i want to know if i should focus more on writing better code or sorting better training sets) thanks and have a nice day submitted by /u/LampardNK [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

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I'm not sure how to articulate this question but it's something i've been thinking too much about submitted by /u/WaggleMcDaggle [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Hi all! What are some interesting applications of machine learning in fields that are not typically associated with technology? For example, have there been any successful projects using ML in fields like sociology, psychology, or political science? If so, could you share some links or references? Looking forwards to discovering your use-cases! submitted by /u/fr4nl4u [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

Legal datasets are extremely expensive because lawyers are, and this has bottlenecked legal NLP. To address this, we release the Merger Agreement Understand Dataset (MAUD), with over 39,000 multiple-choice reading comprehension examples for 152 merger agreements that have been manually labeled by legal experts. The dataset was created with the help of the American Bar Association; without their help the dataset would have cost over $5,000,000 to create. MAUD has substantial room for improvement and can could serve as a research challenge for NLP researchers without any legal background. Dataset and Baselines: https://github.com/TheAtticusProject/maud/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00876 submitted by /u/Sea-Connection462 [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

An open-source implementation of Google AI's T5 in PyTorch. This repository contains the architecture to train your own T5 model. Link to the repository: https://github.com/conceptofmind/t5-pytorch T5 was first presented in Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer by Colin Raffel. You can find a link to the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10683 Lucidrains was kind enough to provide feedback and review for this implementation. Please be sure to follow and support his work: https://github.com/lucidrains You can find the official T5x repository by Google AI here: https://github.com/google-research/t5x submitted by /u/EnricoShippole [link] [comments]  ( 67 min )

Hi All, What book would you recommend for feature engineering, especially for bioinformatics and structural biology? Happy New Year and thanks in advance. submitted by /u/hovo1990 [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Hello mates, Since I have hardly any background in ML, I have somewhat dummy question. My understanding is that the majority of ML is based heavily on inputs generated by humans (some exceptions here would be unsupervised learning and GANs). So, if this is a case, I wonder if ML can truly outperform humans. Of course, in certain areas, like speed of computation or accuracy, computers will also be better than humans, but I am more interested in, shall we say, more general case. Kind regards submitted by /u/groman434 [link] [comments]  ( 85 min )

Hi guys, I have a set of feature values defined as x = {f_1,f_2,...,f_n} (x does not contain any zero) and the goal is to measure the similarity between these features using Mahalanobis distance so x is converted to a diagonal matrix called X_i where the diagonal elements are f_1,f_2,...,f_n, therefore, the distance is measured using columns of X_i. Then I calculate the covariance matrix of X_i which is semi-positive definite (SPD) but the inverse of the covariance matrix is non-SPD and Mahalanobis distance is not valid(it became negative). Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks. submitted by /u/eiliya_20 [link] [comments]  ( 65 min )

Is there a way to do quantization in native pytorch for GPUs (Cuda)? I know that TensorRT offers this functionality, but I would prefer working with native pytorch code. I understand from the pytorch docs, https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/quantization.html, that quantization for the GPU is linked to TensorRT. Given that Nvidia GPUs offer quantization for some time now, it's find it difficult to believe that no other solid implementation for quantization other than TensorRT exists. Grateful for any pointer or suggestions. submitted by /u/faschu [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

Speechbox is built on the premise that Whisper is good enough to pretty much transcribe any English speech. Furthermore, Whisper was trained to predict punctuated and orthographic text. ​ Speechbox leverages Whisper's quality to "unnormalize" audio transcriptions (see examples below) to make them more useful for further downstream applications while guaranteeing that the exact same words are being used. "we are going to the san francisco beach" can have multiple meanings: => We are going to the San Francisco beach! We are going to the San Francisco beach? We are going to the San Francisco beach. ​ Speechbox will pick the correct one for you 😉 ​ 👉 GitHub: https://github.com/huggingface/speechbox 🤗 Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/speechbox/whisper-restore-punctuation submitted by /u/pvp239 [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

At AWS we released Fortuna, a library for Uncertainty Quantification. Fortuna supports conformal prediction, Bayesian inference methods and more. Try it out! GitHub stars are very welcome!!! ⭐⭐⭐ Github repo: https://github.com/awslabs/fortuna submitted by /u/gianluca_detommaso [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

Found this https://data.nasdaq.com/databases/AS500/data, but it’s $1,000 a year. Anything free? Doesn’t have to be one-minute, just granular submitted by /u/side-8182 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

Hi, As part of Huggingface whisper finetuning event I created a demo where you can: Download youtube video with a given URL 2. Watch downloaded video in the first video component 3. Run automatic speech recognition on the video using Whisper models from ggerganov https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp 4. Translate the recognized transcriptions to 26 languages supported by deepL Download generated subtitle files in .srt and .vtt formats 6. Watch the video in another video component with added subtitles You can test it from here --> https://huggingface.co/spaces/RASMUS/Whisper-youtube-crosslingual-subtitles <-- submitted by /u/Finslayer [link] [comments]  ( 66 min )

I have tried to post reminders to both chairs and reviewers, but no one seems to care about my rebuttal and revision. What an exciting experience! submitted by /u/minogame [link] [comments]  ( 65 min )

Tensorflow 1.x is no longer supported on google colab. I want to use create_hparams from hparams and it has contrib module that has been removed in Tensorflow 2.x What shall be the alternative to this? submitted by /u/Affectionate_Bite_50 [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

I've developed a library for the broader C++ developer and machine learning community to access and make use of the OpenAI API. The library follows a simple, elegant syntax similar in style to that of the OpenAI Python library. The library offers access to each component of the API, be it from Images, Fine-tunes, or Embeddings, it can do it--and with ease. It also possesses utility functionality that allows for out-of-box downloading of generated images, setting of request proxies, and so on. Finally, it contains highly-detailed documentation and code examples, as well as emphasizing secure usage of authorization information in the library. You can find it here: https://github.com/D7EAD/liboai. Enjoy! submitted by /u/throwaway1322482942 [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

Hello everyone, I am working on a task to generate questions on some documents, currently manual creation of questions by domain experts is a very time consuming process, could anyone please suggest some good NLP models which can generate human like questions given a text. submitted by /u/arush1836 [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

I created my own standard CNN. It can run on either C# or compute shader(GPU) in Unity. I am an experienced coder but I am still new to neural networks but I coded my own to help build my understanding of them. The Model: I am attempting to train the network to complete sentences of given text. (this may be the wrong approach). I am training the network with film dialog. I first sort through the dialog and convert the words into indexes for a list of all words in the dataset. The first input layer is 50 (Max of 50 words from user) and the output is just one index which is supposed to be the predicted word. The word indexes are normalized to be from 0-1 based on max word value. Training goes through every sentence word by word, and tells the network the next word after as the answer. The Problem: This is working well in small scale tests, but exponentially falls apart in larger scale models. The reason is that the more total words there are, the more exponentially sensitive the normalized indexes become since it's in the range of 0-1. Which makes training the network near impossible once there are thousands of words. Is there some simple solution I am missing when it comes to outputing sensitive index values? Any helps/ideas would be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/TheRPGGamerMan [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

Hi guys, I have taken a course (undergrad) on Applied Machine Learning this semester and we have to do a project as part of our course. Our professor has suggested that we do something related to DL/RL since these 2 are quite active these days in research. Can someone please suggest some nice ideas/directions? I am not an absolute beginner in ML/RL and do know basic RL theory and pytorch. Our semester ends by May so a project should be doable in around 3 months. So I'm hoping that the project should be a good learning experience but also good enough to showcase my skills beyond the course (like in my CV and stuff, or possibly some research publication after working on it further). Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/6obama_bin_laden9 [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

Hey there! I’m happy to announce that we just published the fourth Unit of the Deep Reinforcement Learning Course) 🥳 In this Unit, you’ll learn about Policy-based methods and code your first Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm from scratch using PyTorch 🔥 You’ll then train this agent to play PixelCopter 🚁 and CartPole. You’ll be then able to improve the implementation with Convolutional Neural Networks. Start Learning now 👉 https://huggingface.co/deep-rl-course/unit4/introduction https://preview.redd.it/f7wpgv0g82aa1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=09320316c02da83610e2c75ce18ae76a6c1df301 New year, new resolutions, if you want to start to learn about reinforcement learning, we launched this course, and don’t worry there’s still time and 2023 is the perfect year to start. We wrote an introduction unit to help you get started. You can start learning now 👉 https://huggingface.co/deep-rl-course/unit0/introduction If you have questions or feedback I would love to answer them. submitted by /u/cranthir_ [link] [comments]  ( 58 min )

I am a Master's student looking for my Erasmus program and I would like to go to a university that does research in the field (I am currently a research assistant at Polimi). It's impossible for me to check every available university for the exchange so I would like to know if you could suggest some universities to look out for. (There are a lot of programs in the EU, some in China and Asia in general, and some in South America, just one in the USA with Florida university, but if you have any idea please tell me) Thanks! submitted by /u/Mysterious-Ad-5721 [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

Hi all, I am carrying out an optimisation problem on an RL task on a graph network. the observation space is a node embedding vector of n-dimensions. The reason for this choice is to be able to make the task invariant to graph size at test time. The action space is the number of nodes on the graph (it is a node-removal optimisation task so it can decide on any node to remove on the graph). The issue of course is that at test time, i might be faced with a graph that is either bigger or smaller and thus have an action space that has now changed. I was wondering how people may suggest to overcome this when making the original training phase invariant to the size of the graph? One idea could be to make it such that the environment 'presents' a node and the agent has to decide on whether it should remove or leave alone - however this seems laborious and i would like for the agent to be able to look at the graph and make an immediate decision on which action it takes. I have read several publications of this sort of approach with the advantage being that the task can now be applied to any graph size, but I am having a brain freeze abut how the action space is managed when the agent is presented with a graph of a size it has never seen before. Any advise or help is appreciated. thank you! submitted by /u/amjass12 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

For an environment I am currently working with I have two non-RL benchmark policies - a rule-based one and an modell-predictive one. The distributions of actions these two policies produce are looking like exponential distributions (see Picture). ​ https://preview.redd.it/2x5n2gn3d0aa1.png?width=578&format=png&auto=webp&s=892975a08a669de14ced228937175361f406c7e9 This made me wondering.. Is there any connection between the selected distribution for exploration (in PPO and SAC for eaxmple) and the desired distribution of actions? Are there any assumption about the distribution of actions when using a Normal Distribution for exploration? Because intuitively I would assume with a Normal Distribution for exploration actions greater and less than mean of the normal should lead to somewhat equal rewards. Otherwise choosing a normal distribution for exploration wouldn't make much sense. Also I suspect given an action distribution like the one in the picture the agent will not be able to learn is unless the standard deviation of the normal distribution becomes very small. What should I do in a case like this? I was thinking about doing a transformation of the action space so the actions are distributed more evenly. Then learn these actions with linear output + normal distribution and do the transformation as part of the environment. Neural Network -> Linear -> Normal -> Transformation -> Environment Instead of : Neural Network -> Tanh -> Normal -> Environment like it's usually done. submitted by /u/flxh13 [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

Editor’s note: This is part of a series profiling people advancing science with high performance computing. Ryan Coffee makes movies of molecules. Their impacts are huge. The senior scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (above) says these visualizations could unlock the secrets of photosynthesis. They’ve already shown how sunlight can cause skin cancer. Long Read article >  ( 6 min )

When NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky approached University of Florida Provost Joe Glover with the offer of an AI supercomputer, he couldn’t have predicted the transformative impact it would have on the university. In just a short time, UF has become one of the top public colleges in the U.S. and developed a groundbreaking neural network Read article >  ( 5 min )

A new method can produce a hundredfold increase in light emissions from a type of electron-photon coupling, which is key to electron microscopes and other technologies.  ( 9 min )

2023 UPDATE! Just published a book with 1337 use cases and around 4000 examples.  ( 157 min )

Choose your Programming Language  ( 12 min )

The EdgeRunner Agent #Issue 1 Continue reading on Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine »  ( 22 min )

Robots celebrate holidays?  ( 6 min )

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) recently has achieved tremendous success in a wide range of fields. However, with a black-box neural network architecture, existing MARL methods make decisions in an opaque fashion that hinders humans from understanding the learned knowledge and how input observations influence decisions. Our solution is MIXing Recurrent soft decision Trees (MIXRTs), a novel interpretable architecture that can represent explicit decision processes via the root-to-leaf path of decision trees. We introduce a novel recurrent structure in soft decision trees to address partial observability, and estimate joint action values via linearly mixing outputs of recurrent trees based on local observations only. Theoretical analysis shows that MIXRTs guarantees the structural constraint with additivity and monotonicity in factorization. We evaluate MIXRTs on a range of challenging StarCraft II tasks. Experimental results show that our interpretable learning framework obtains competitive performance compared to widely investigated baselines, and delivers more straightforward explanations and domain knowledge of the decision processes.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is currently one of the most commonly used techniques for traffic signal control (TSC), which can adaptively adjusted traffic signal phase and duration according to real-time traffic data. However, a fully centralized RL approach is beset with difficulties in a multi-network scenario because of exponential growth in state-action space with increasing intersections. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can overcome the high-dimension problem by employing the global control of each local RL agent, but it also brings new challenges, such as the failure of convergence caused by the non-stationary Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper, we introduce an off-policy nash deep Q-Network (OPNDQN) algorithm, which mitigates the weakness of both fully centralized and MARL approaches. The OPNDQN algorithm solves the problem that traditional algorithms cannot be used in large state-action space traffic models by utilizing a fictitious game approach at each iteration to find the nash equilibrium among neighboring intersections, from which no intersection has incentive to unilaterally deviate. One of main advantages of OPNDQN is to mitigate the non-stationarity of multi-agent Markov process because it considers the mutual influence among neighboring intersections by sharing their actions. On the other hand, for training a large traffic network, the convergence rate of OPNDQN is higher than that of existing MARL approaches because it does not incorporate all state information of each agent. We conduct an extensive experiments by using Simulation of Urban MObility simulator (SUMO), and show the dominant superiority of OPNDQN over several existing MARL approaches in terms of average queue length, episode training reward and average waiting time.  ( 2 min )

Finding discriminant functions of minimum risk binary classification systems is a novel geometric locus problem -- which requires solving a system of fundamental locus equations of binary classification -- subject to deep-seated statistical laws. We show that a discriminant function of a minimum risk binary classification system is the solution of a locus equation that represents the geometric locus of the decision boundary of the system, wherein the discriminant function is connected to the decision boundary by an exclusive principal eigen-coordinate system -- at which point the discriminant function is represented by a geometric locus of a novel principal eigenaxis -- structured as a dual locus of likelihood components and principal eigenaxis components. We demonstrate that a minimum risk binary classification system acts to jointly minimize its eigenenergy and risk by locating a point of equilibrium, at which point critical minimum eigenenergies exhibited by the system are symmetrically concentrated in such a manner that the novel principal eigenaxis of the system exhibits symmetrical dimensions and densities, so that counteracting and opposing forces and influences of the system are symmetrically balanced with each other -- about the geometric center of the locus of the novel principal eigenaxis -- whereon the statistical fulcrum of the system is located. Thereby, a minimum risk binary classification system satisfies a state of statistical equilibrium -- so that the total allowed eigenenergy and the expected risk exhibited by the system are jointly minimized within the decision space of the system -- at which point the system exhibits the minimum probability of classification error.  ( 3 min )

Inspired by the success of contrastive learning (CL) in computer vision and natural language processing, graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been developed to learn discriminative node representations on graph datasets. However, the development of GCL on Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) is still in the infant stage. For example, it is unclear how to augment the HINs without substantially altering the underlying semantics, and how to design the contrastive objective to fully capture the rich semantics. Moreover, early investigations demonstrate that CL suffers from sampling bias, whereas conventional debiasing techniques are empirically shown to be inadequate for GCL. How to mitigate the sampling bias for heterogeneous GCL is another important problem. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Multi-view Learning (HGCML) model. In particular, we use metapaths as the augmentation to generate multiple subgraphs as multi-views, and propose a contrastive objective to maximize the mutual information between any pairs of metapath-induced views. To alleviate the sampling bias, we further propose a positive sampling strategy to explicitly select positives for each node via jointly considering semantic and structural information preserved on each metapath view. Extensive experiments demonstrate HGCML consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on five real-world benchmark datasets.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a privacy-preserving approach in distributed machine learning. A federated learning architecture consists of a central server and a number of clients that have access to private, potentially sensitive data. Clients are able to keep their data in their local machines and only share their locally trained model's parameters with a central server that manages the collaborative learning process. FL has delivered promising results in real-life scenarios, such as healthcare, energy, and finance. However, when the number of participating clients is large, the overhead of managing the clients slows down the learning. Thus, client selection has been introduced as a strategy to limit the number of communicating parties at every step of the process. Since the early na\"{i}ve random selection of clients, several client selection methods have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, given that this is an emergent field, there is a lack of a taxonomy of client selection methods, making it hard to compare approaches. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of client selection in Federated Learning that enables us to shed light on current progress in the field and identify potential areas of future research in this promising area of machine learning.  ( 2 min )

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising brain-inspired energy-efficient models. Recent progress in training methods has enabled successful deep SNNs on large-scale tasks with low latency. Particularly, backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) is popularly used to achieve high performance in a very small number of time steps. However, it is at the cost of large memory consumption for training, lack of theoretical clarity for optimization, and inconsistency with the online property of biological learning and rules on neuromorphic hardware. Other works connect spike representations of SNNs with equivalent artificial neural network formulation and train SNNs by gradients from equivalent mappings to ensure descent directions. But they fail to achieve low latency and are also not online. In this work, we propose online training through time (OTTT) for SNNs, which is derived from BPTT to enable forward-in-time learning by tracking presynaptic activities and leveraging instantaneous loss and gradients. Meanwhile, we theoretically analyze and prove that gradients of OTTT can provide a similar descent direction for optimization as gradients based on spike representations under both feedforward and recurrent conditions. OTTT only requires constant training memory costs agnostic to time steps, avoiding the significant memory costs of BPTT for GPU training. Furthermore, the update rule of OTTT is in the form of three-factor Hebbian learning, which could pave a path for online on-chip learning. With OTTT, it is the first time that two mainstream supervised SNN training methods, BPTT with SG and spike representation-based training, are connected, and meanwhile in a biologically plausible form. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and CIFAR10-DVS demonstrate the superior performance of our method on large-scale static and neuromorphic datasets in small time steps.  ( 2 min )

Dysgraphia, a handwriting learning disability, has a serious negative impact on children's academic results, daily life and overall wellbeing. Early detection of dysgraphia allows for an early start of a targeted intervention. Several studies have investigated dysgraphia detection by machine learning algorithms using a digital tablet. However, these studies deployed classical machine learning algorithms with manual feature extraction and selection as well as binary classification: either dysgraphia or no dysgraphia. In this work, we investigated fine grading of handwriting capabilities by predicting SEMS score (between 0 and 12) with deep learning. Our approach provide accuracy more than 99% and root mean square error lower than one, with automatic instead of manual feature extraction and selection. Furthermore, we used smart pen called SensoGrip, a pen equipped with sensors to capture handwriting dynamics, instead of a tablet, enabling writing evaluation in more realistic scenarios.  ( 2 min )

Exposure to crime and violence can harm individuals' quality of life and the economic growth of communities. In light of the rapid development in machine learning, there is a rise in the need to explore automated solutions to prevent crimes. With the increasing availability of both fine-grained urban and public service data, there is a recent surge in fusing such cross-domain information to facilitate crime prediction. By capturing the information about social structure, environment, and crime trends, existing machine learning predictive models have explored the dynamic crime patterns from different views. However, these approaches mostly convert such multi-source knowledge into implicit and latent representations (e.g., learned embeddings of districts), making it still a challenge to investigate the impacts of explicit factors for the occurrences of crimes behind the scenes. In this paper, we present a Spatial-Temporal Metapath guided Explainable Crime prediction (STMEC) framework to capture dynamic patterns of crime behaviours and explicitly characterize how the environmental and social factors mutually interact to produce the forecasts. Extensive experiments show the superiority of STMEC compared with other advanced spatiotemporal models, especially in predicting felonies (e.g., robberies and assaults with dangerous weapons).  ( 2 min )

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models confront challenges of abrupt informational collapse or slow dimensional collapse. We propose TriNet, which introduces a novel triple-branch architecture for preventing collapse and stabilizing the pre-training. Our experimental results show that the proposed method notably stabilizes and accelerates pre-training and achieves a relative word error rate reduction (WERR) of 5.32% compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) Data2vec for a downstream benchmark ASR task. We will release our code at https://github.com/tencent-ailab/.  ( 2 min )

Missing values are a common problem in data science and machine learning. Removing instances with missing values can adversely affect the quality of further data analysis. This is exacerbated when there are relatively many more features than instances, and thus the proportion of affected instances is high. Such a scenario is common in many important domains, for example, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) datasets provide a large number of features over a genome for a relatively small number of individuals. To preserve as much information as possible prior to modeling, a rigorous imputation scheme is acutely needed. While Denoising Autoencoders is a state-of-the-art method for imputation in high-dimensional data, they still require enough complete cases to be trained on which is often not available in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider missing value imputation as a multi-label classification problem and propose Chains of Autoreplicative Random Forests. Using multi-label Random Forests instead of neural networks works well for low-sampled data as there are fewer parameters to optimize. Experiments on several SNP datasets show that our algorithm effectively imputes missing values based only on information from the dataset and exhibits better performance than standard algorithms that do not require any additional information. In this paper, the algorithm is implemented specifically for SNP data, but it can easily be adapted for other cases of missing value imputation.  ( 2 min )

Model compression via quantization and sparsity enhancement has gained an immense interest to enable the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in resource-constrained edge environments. Although these techniques have shown promising results in reducing the energy, latency and memory requirements of the DNNs, their performance in non-ideal real-world settings (such as in the presence of hardware faults) is yet to be completely understood. In this paper, we investigate the impact of bit-flip and stuck-at faults on activation-sparse quantized DNNs (QDNNs). We show that a high level of activation sparsity comes at the cost of larger vulnerability to faults. For instance, activation-sparse QDNNs exhibit up to 17.32% lower accuracy than the standard QDNNs. We also establish that one of the major cause of the degraded accuracy is sharper minima in the loss landscape for activation-sparse QDNNs, which makes them more sensitive to perturbations in the weight values due to faults. Based on this observation, we propose the mitigation of the impact of faults by employing a sharpness-aware quantization (SAQ) training scheme. The activation-sparse and standard QDNNs trained with SAQ have up to 36.71% and 24.76% higher inference accuracy, respectively compared to their conventionally trained equivalents. Moreover, we show that SAQ-trained activation-sparse QDNNs show better accuracy in faulty settings than standard QDNNs trained conventionally. Thus the proposed technique can be instrumental in achieving sparsity-related energy/latency benefits without compromising on fault tolerance.  ( 2 min )

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software brings resources, data together to keep software-flow within business processes in a company. However, cloud computing's cheap, easy and quick management promise pushes business-owners for a transition from monolithic to a data-center/cloud based ERP. Since cloud-ERP development involves a cyclic process, namely planning, implementing, testing and upgrading, its adoption is realized as a deep recurrent neural network problem. Eventually, a classification algorithm based on long short term memory (LSTM) and TOPSIS is proposed to identify and rank, respectively, adoption features. Our theoretical model is validated over a reference model by articulating key players, services, architecture, functionalities. Qualitative survey is conducted among users by considering technology, innovation and resistance issues, to formulate hypotheses on key adoption factors.  ( 2 min )

Data-driven models such as neural networks are being applied more and more to safety-critical applications, such as the modeling and control of cyber-physical systems. Despite the flexibility of the approach, there are still concerns about the safety of these models in this context, as well as the need for large amounts of potentially expensive data. In particular, when long-term predictions are needed or frequent measurements are not available, the open-loop stability of the model becomes important. However, it is difficult to make such guarantees for complex black-box models such as neural networks, and prior work has shown that model stability is indeed an issue. In this work, we consider an aluminum extraction process where measurements of the internal state of the reactor are time-consuming and expensive. We model the process using neural networks and investigate the role of including skip connections in the network architecture as well as using l1 regularization to induce sparse connection weights. We demonstrate that these measures can greatly improve both the accuracy and the stability of the models for datasets of varying sizes.  ( 2 min )

Multi-fidelity Kriging model is a promising technique in surrogate-based design as it can balance the model accuracy and cost of sample preparation by fusing low- and high-fidelity data. However, the cost for building a multi-fidelity Kriging model increases significantly with the increase of the problem dimension. To attack this issue, an efficient Hierarchical Kriging modeling method is proposed. In building the low-fidelity model, the maximal information coefficient is utilized to calculate the relative value of the hyperparameter. With this, the maximum likelihood estimation problem for determining the hyperparameters is transformed as a one-dimension optimization problem, which can be solved in an efficient manner and thus improve the modeling efficiency significantly. A local search is involved further to exploit the search space of hyperparameters to improve the model accuracy. The high-fidelity model is built in a similar manner with the hyperparameter of the low-fidelity model served as the relative value of the hyperparameter for high-fidelity model. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the conventional tuning strategy, by testing them over ten analytic problems and an engineering problem of modeling the isentropic efficiency of a compressor rotor. The empirical results demonstrate that the modeling time of the proposed method is reduced significantly without sacrificing the model accuracy. For the modeling of the isentropic efficiency of the compressor rotor, the cost saving associated with the proposed method is about 90% compared with the conventional strategy. Meanwhile, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy.  ( 2 min )

In this research, we aim to explore the potential of natural language models (NLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-2 to generate effective phishing emails. Phishing emails are fraudulent messages that aim to trick individuals into revealing sensitive information or taking actions that benefit the attackers. We propose a framework for evaluating the performance of NLMs in generating these types of emails based on various criteria, including the quality of the generated text, the ability to bypass spam filters, and the success rate of tricking individuals. Our evaluations show that NLMs are capable of generating phishing emails that are difficult to detect and that have a high success rate in tricking individuals, but their effectiveness varies based on the specific NLM and training data used. Our research indicates that NLMs could have a significant impact on the prevalence of phishing attacks and emphasizes the need for further study on the ethical and security implications of using NLMs for malicious purposes.  ( 2 min )

We consider a novel lossy compression approach based on unconditional diffusion generative models, which we call DiffC. Unlike modern compression schemes which rely on transform coding and quantization to restrict the transmitted information, DiffC relies on the efficient communication of pixels corrupted by Gaussian noise. We implement a proof of concept and find that it works surprisingly well despite the lack of an encoder transform, outperforming the state-of-the-art generative compression method HiFiC on ImageNet 64x64. DiffC only uses a single model to encode and denoise corrupted pixels at arbitrary bitrates. The approach further provides support for progressive coding, that is, decoding from partial bit streams. We perform a rate-distortion analysis to gain a deeper understanding of its performance, providing analytical results for multivariate Gaussian data as well as theoretic bounds for general distributions. Furthermore, we prove that a flow-based reconstruction achieves a 3 dB gain over ancestral sampling at high bitrates.  ( 2 min )

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. Uncontrollable growth of melanocytes leads to melanoma. Melanoma has been growing wildly in the last few decades. In recent years, the detection of melanoma using image processing techniques has become a dominant research field. The Automatic Melanoma Detection System (AMDS) helps to detect melanoma based on image processing techniques by accepting infected skin area images as input. A single lesion image is a source of multiple features. Therefore, It is crucial to select the appropriate features from the image of the lesion in order to increase the accuracy of AMDS. For melanoma detection, all extracted features are not important. Some of the extracted features are complex and require more computation tasks, which impacts the classification accuracy of AMDS. The feature extraction phase of AMDS exhibits more variability, therefore it is important to study the behaviour of AMDS using individual and extended feature extraction approaches. A novel algorithm ExtFvAMDS is proposed for the calculation of Extended Feature Vector Space. The six models proposed in the comparative study revealed that the HSV feature vector space for automatic detection of melanoma using Ensemble Bagged Tree classifier on Med-Node Dataset provided 99% AUC, 95.30% accuracy, 94.23% sensitivity, and 96.96% specificity.  ( 2 min )

Given a large graph with few node labels, how can we (a) identify the mixed network-effect of the graph and (b) predict the unknown labels accurately and efficiently? This work proposes Network Effect Analysis (NEA) and UltraProp, which are based on two insights: (a) the network-effect (NE) insight: a graph can exhibit not only one of homophily and heterophily, but also both or none in a label-wise manner, and (b) the neighbor-differentiation (ND) insight: neighbors have different degrees of influence on the target node based on the strength of connections. NEA provides a statistical test to check whether a graph exhibits network-effect or not, and surprisingly discovers the absence of NE in many real-world graphs known to have heterophily. UltraProp solves the node classification problem with notable advantages: (a) Accurate, thanks to the network-effect (NE) and neighbor-differentiation (ND) insights; (b) Explainable, precisely estimating the compatibility matrix; (c) Scalable, being linear with the input size and handling graphs with millions of nodes; and (d) Principled, with closed-form formula and theoretical guarantee. Applied on eight real-world graph datasets, UltraProp outperforms top competitors in terms of accuracy and run time, requiring only stock CPU servers. On a large real-world graph with 1.6M nodes and 22.3M edges, UltraProp achieves more than 9 times speedup (12 minutes vs. 2 hours) compared to most competitors.  ( 2 min )

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.  ( 2 min )

In replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy resources for carbon neutrality, the unbalanced resource production of intermittent wind and photovoltaic (PV) power is a critical issue for peer-to-peer (P2P) power trading. To address this issue, a reinforcement learning (RL) technique is introduced in this paper. For RL, a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network are jointly applied to P2P power trading between nanogrid clusters, based on cooperative game theory. The flexible and reliable DC nanogrid is suitable for integrating renewable energy for a distribution system. Each local nanogrid cluster takes the position of prosumer, focusing on power production and consumption simultaneously. For the power management of nanogrid cluster, multi-objective optimization is applied to each local nanogrid cluster with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Charging/discharging of an electric vehicle (EV) is executed considering the intermittent characteristics of wind and PV power production. RL algorithms, such as GCN- convolutional neural network (CNN) layers for deep Q-learning network (DQN), GCN-LSTM layers for deep recurrent Q-learning network (DRQN), GCN-Bi-LSTM layers for DRQN, and GCN-Bi-LSTM layers for proximal policy optimization (PPO), are used for simulations. Consequently, the cooperative P2P power trading system maximizes the profit by considering the time of use (ToU) tariff-based electricity cost and the system marginal price (SMP), and minimizes the amount of grid power consumption. Power management of nanogrid clusters with P2P power trading is simulated on a distribution test feeder in real time, and the proposed GCN-Bi-LSTM-PPO technique achieving the lowest electricity cost among the RL algorithms used for comparison reduces the electricity cost by 36.7%, averaging over nanogrid clusters.  ( 3 min )

Single-cell transcriptomics enabled the study of cellular heterogeneity in response to perturbations at the resolution of individual cells. However, scaling high-throughput screens (HTSs) to measure cellular responses for many drugs remains a challenge due to technical limitations and, more importantly, the cost of such multiplexed experiments. Thus, transferring information from routinely performed bulk RNA HTS is required to enrich single-cell data meaningfully. We introduce chemCPA, a new encoder-decoder architecture to study the perturbational effects of unseen drugs. We combine the model with an architecture surgery for transfer learning and demonstrate how training on existing bulk RNA HTS datasets can improve generalisation performance. Better generalisation reduces the need for extensive and costly screens at single-cell resolution. We envision that our proposed method will facilitate more efficient experiment designs through its ability to generate in-silico hypotheses, ultimately accelerating drug discovery.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we propose a Dimension-Reduced Second-Order Method (DRSOM) for convex and nonconvex (unconstrained) optimization. Under a trust-region-like framework, our method preserves the convergence of the second-order method while using only curvature information in a few directions. Consequently, the computational overhead of our method remains comparable to the first-order such as the gradient descent method. Theoretically, we show that the method has a local quadratic convergence and a global convergence rate of $O(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ to satisfy the first-order and second-order conditions if the subspace satisfies a commonly adopted approximated Hessian assumption. We further show that this assumption can be removed if we perform one \emph{corrector step} (using a Krylov method, for example) periodically at the end stage of the algorithm. The applicability and performance of DRSOM are exhibited by various computational experiments, particularly in machine learning and deep learning. For neural networks, our preliminary implementation seems to gain computational advantages in terms of training accuracy and iteration complexity over state-of-the-art first-order methods such as SGD and ADAM.  ( 2 min )

Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace, bringing together hosts who own listings for rent, with prospective guests from around the globe. Applying neural network-based learning to rank techniques has led to significant improvements in matching guests with hosts. These improvements in ranking were driven by a core strategy: order the listings by their estimated booking probabilities, then iterate on techniques to make these booking probability estimates more and more accurate. Embedded implicitly in this strategy was an assumption that the booking probability of a listing could be determined independently of other listings in search results. In this paper we discuss how this assumption, pervasive throughout the commonly-used learning to rank frameworks, is false. We provide a theoretical foundation correcting this assumption, followed by efficient neural network architectures based on the theory. Explicitly accounting for possible similarities between listings, and reducing them to diversify the search results generated strong positive impact. We discuss these metric wins as part of the online A/B tests of the theory. Our method provides a practical way to diversify search results for large-scale production ranking systems.  ( 2 min )

Statistical power is a measure of the replicability of a categorical hypothesis test. Formally, it is the probability of detecting an effect, if there is a true effect present in the population. Hence, optimizing statistical power as a function of some parameters of a hypothesis test is desirable. However, for most hypothesis tests, the explicit functional form of statistical power for individual model parameters is unknown; but calculating power for a given set of values of those parameters is possible using simulated experiments. These simulated experiments are usually computationally expensive. Hence, developing the entire statistical power manifold using simulations can be very time-consuming. We propose a novel genetic algorithm-based framework for learning statistical power manifolds. For a multiple linear regression $F$-test, we show that the proposed algorithm/framework learns the statistical power manifold much faster as compared to a brute-force approach as the number of queries to the power oracle is significantly reduced. We also show that the quality of learning the manifold improves as the number of iterations increases for the genetic algorithm. Such tools are useful for evaluating statistical power trade-offs when researchers have little information regarding a priori `best guesses' of primary effect sizes of interest or how sampling variability in non-primary effects impacts power for primary ones.  ( 2 min )

Iterative refinement -- start with a random guess, then iteratively improve the guess -- is a useful paradigm for representation learning because it offers a way to break symmetries among equally plausible explanations for the data. This property enables the application of such methods to infer representations of sets of entities, such as objects in physical scenes, structurally resembling clustering algorithms in latent space. However, most prior works differentiate through the unrolled refinement process, which can make optimization challenging. We observe that such methods can be made differentiable by means of the implicit function theorem, and develop an implicit differentiation approach that improves the stability and tractability of training by decoupling the forward and backward passes. This connection enables us to apply advances in optimizing implicit layers to not only improve the optimization of the slot attention module in SLATE, a state-of-the-art method for learning entity representations, but do so with constant space and time complexity in backpropagation and only one additional line of code.  ( 2 min )

Application of machine learning may be understood as deriving new knowledge for practical use through explaining accumulated observations, training set. Peirce used the term abduction for this kind of inference. Here I formalize the concept of abduction for real valued hypotheses, and show that 14 of the most popular textbook ML learners (every learner I tested), covering classification, regression and clustering, implement this concept of abduction inference. The approach is proposed as an alternative to statistical learning theory, which requires an impractical assumption of indefinitely increasing training set for its justification.  ( 2 min )

Tree ensembles can be well-suited for black-box optimization tasks such as algorithm tuning and neural architecture search, as they achieve good predictive performance with little or no manual tuning, naturally handle discrete feature spaces, and are relatively insensitive to outliers in the training data. Two well-known challenges in using tree ensembles for black-box optimization are (i) effectively quantifying model uncertainty for exploration and (ii) optimizing over the piece-wise constant acquisition function. To address both points simultaneously, we propose using the kernel interpretation of tree ensembles as a Gaussian Process prior to obtain model variance estimates, and we develop a compatible optimization formulation for the acquisition function. The latter further allows us to seamlessly integrate known constraints to improve sampling efficiency by considering domain-knowledge in engineering settings and modeling search space symmetries, e.g., hierarchical relationships in neural architecture search. Our framework performs as well as state-of-the-art methods for unconstrained black-box optimization over continuous/discrete features and outperforms competing methods for problems combining mixed-variable feature spaces and known input constraints.  ( 2 min )

Current approaches to multi-agent cooperation rely heavily on centralized mechanisms or explicit communication protocols to ensure convergence. This paper studies the problem of distributed multi-agent learning without resorting to centralized components or explicit communication. It examines the use of distribution matching to facilitate the coordination of independent agents. In the proposed scheme, each agent independently minimizes the distribution mismatch to the corresponding component of a target visitation distribution. The theoretical analysis shows that under certain conditions, each agent minimizing its individual distribution mismatch allows the convergence to the joint policy that generated the target distribution. Further, if the target distribution is from a joint policy that optimizes a cooperative task, the optimal policy for a combination of this task reward and the distribution matching reward is the same joint policy. This insight is used to formulate a practical algorithm (DM$^2$), in which each individual agent matches a target distribution derived from concurrently sampled trajectories from a joint expert policy. Experimental validation on the StarCraft domain shows that combining (1) a task reward, and (2) a distribution matching reward for expert demonstrations for the same task, allows agents to outperform a naive distributed baseline. Additional experiments probe the conditions under which expert demonstrations need to be sampled to obtain the learning benefits.  ( 2 min )

Agents that can follow language instructions are expected to be useful in a variety of situations such as navigation. However, training neural network-based agents requires numerous paired trajectories and languages. This paper proposes using multimodal generative models for semi-supervised learning in the instruction following tasks. The models learn a shared representation of the paired data, and enable semi-supervised learning by reconstructing unpaired data through the representation. Key challenges in applying the models to sequence-to-sequence tasks including instruction following are learning a shared representation of variable-length mulitimodal data and incorporating attention mechanisms. To address the problems, this paper proposes a novel network architecture to absorb the difference in the sequence lengths of the multimodal data. In addition, to further improve the performance, this paper shows how to incorporate the generative model-based approach with an existing semi-supervised method called a speaker-follower model, and proposes a regularization term that improves inference using unpaired trajectories. Experiments on BabyAI and Room-to-Room (R2R) environments show that the proposed method improves the performance of instruction following by leveraging unpaired data, and improves the performance of the speaker-follower model by 2\% to 4\% in R2R.

In the scenario of black-box adversarial attack, the target model's parameters are unknown, and the attacker aims to find a successful adversarial perturbation based on query feedback under a query budget. Due to the limited feedback information, existing query-based black-box attack methods often require many queries for attacking each benign example. To reduce query cost, we propose to utilize the feedback information across historical attacks, dubbed example-level adversarial transferability. Specifically, by treating the attack on each benign example as one task, we develop a meta-learning framework by training a meta-generator to produce perturbations conditioned on benign examples. When attacking a new benign example, the meta generator can be quickly fine-tuned based on the feedback information of the new task as well as a few historical attacks to produce effective perturbations. Moreover, since the meta-train procedure consumes many queries to learn a generalizable generator, we utilize model-level adversarial transferability to train the meta-generator on a white-box surrogate model, then transfer it to help the attack against the target model. The proposed framework with the two types of adversarial transferability can be naturally combined with any off-the-shelf query-based attack methods to boost their performance, which is verified by extensive experiments.

Although the recursive logit (RL) model has been recently popular and has led to many applications and extensions, an important numerical issue with respect to the computation of value functions remains unsolved. This issue is particularly significant for model estimation, during which the parameters are updated every iteration and may violate the feasibility condition of the value function. To solve this numerical issue of the value function in the model estimation, this study performs an extensive analysis of a prism-constrained RL (Prism-RL) model proposed by Oyama and Hato (2019), which has a path set constrained by the prism defined based upon a state-extended network representation. The numerical experiments have shown two important properties of the Prism-RL model for parameter estimation. First, the prism-based approach enables estimation regardless of the initial and true parameter values, even in cases where the original RL model cannot be estimated due to the numerical problem. We also successfully captured a positive effect of the presence of street green on pedestrian route choice in a real application. Second, the Prism-RL model achieved better fit and prediction performance than the RL model, by implicitly restricting paths with large detour or many loops. Defining the prism-based path set in a data-oriented manner, we demonstrated the possibility of the Prism-RL model describing more realistic route choice behavior. The capture of positive network attributes while retaining the diversity of path alternatives is important in many applications such as pedestrian route choice and sequential destination choice behavior, and thus the prism-based approach significantly extends the practical applicability of the RL model.  ( 2 min )

This paper introduces a novel algorithm, the Perturbed Proximal Preconditioned SPIDER algorithm (3P-SPIDER), designed to solve finite sum non-convex composite optimization. It is a stochastic Variable Metric Forward-Backward algorithm, which allows approximate preconditioned forward operator and uses a variable metric proximity operator as the backward operator; it also proposes a mini-batch strategy with variance reduction to address the finite sum setting. We show that 3P-SPIDER extends some Stochastic preconditioned Gradient Descent-based algorithms and some Incremental Expectation Maximization algorithms to composite optimization and to the case the forward operator can not be computed in closed form. We also provide an explicit control of convergence in expectation of 3P-SPIDER, and study its complexity in order to satisfy the epsilon-approximate stationary condition. Our results are the first to combine the composite non-convex optimization setting, a variance reduction technique to tackle the finite sum setting by using a minibatch strategy and, to allow deterministic or random approximations of the preconditioned forward operator. Finally, through an application to inference in a logistic regression model with random effects, we numerically compare 3P-SPIDER to other stochastic forward-backward algorithms and discuss the role of some design parameters of 3P-SPIDER.

This is paper for the smooth function approximation by neural networks (NN). Mathematical or physical functions can be replaced by NN models through regression. In this study, we get NNs that generate highly accurate and highly smooth function, which only comprised of a few weight parameters, through discussing a few topics about regression. First, we reinterpret inside of NNs for regression; consequently, we propose a new activation function--integrated sigmoid linear unit (ISLU). Then special charateristics of metadata for regression, which is different from other data like image or sound, is discussed for improving the performance of neural networks. Finally, the one of a simple hierarchical NN that generate models substituting mathematical function is presented, and the new batch concept ``meta-batch" which improves the performance of NN several times more is introduced. The new activation function, meta-batch method, features of numerical data, meta-augmentation with metaparameters, and a structure of NN generating a compact multi-layer perceptron(MLP) are essential in this study.

This study demonstrates the feasibility of point cloud-based proactive link quality prediction for millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. Image-based methods to quantitatively and deterministically predict future received signal strength using machine learning from time series of depth images to mitigate the human body line-of-sight (LOS) path blockage in mmWave communications have been proposed. However, image-based methods have been limited in applicable environments because camera images may contain private information. Thus, this study demonstrates the feasibility of using point clouds obtained from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for the mmWave link quality prediction. Point clouds represent three-dimensional (3D) spaces as a set of points and are sparser and less likely to contain sensitive information than camera images. Additionally, point clouds provide 3D position and motion information, which is necessary for understanding the radio propagation environment involving pedestrians. This study designs the mmWave link quality prediction method and conducts two experimental evaluations using different types of point clouds obtained from LiDAR and depth cameras, as well as different numerical indicators of link quality, received signal strength and throughput. Based on these experiments, our proposed method can predict future large attenuation of mmWave link quality due to LOS blockage by human bodies, therefore our point cloud-based method can be an alternative to image-based methods.

A noisy training set usually leads to the degradation of the generalization and robustness of neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretically guaranteed clean sample selection framework for learning with noisy labels. Specifically, we first present a Scalable Penalized Regression (SPR) method, to model the linear relation between network features and one-hot labels. In SPR, the clean data are identified by the zero mean-shift parameters solved in the regression model. We theoretically show that SPR can recover clean data under some conditions. Under general scenarios, the conditions may be no longer satisfied; and some noisy data are falsely selected as clean data. To solve this problem, we propose a data-adaptive method for Scalable Penalized Regression with Knockoff filters (Knockoffs-SPR), which is provable to control the False-Selection-Rate (FSR) in the selected clean data. To improve the efficiency, we further present a split algorithm that divides the whole training set into small pieces that can be solved in parallel to make the framework scalable to large datasets. While Knockoffs-SPR can be regarded as a sample selection module for a standard supervised training pipeline, we further combine it with a semi-supervised algorithm to exploit the support of noisy data as unlabeled data. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets and real-world noisy datasets show the effectiveness of our framework and validate the theoretical results of Knockoffs-SPR. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.  ( 2 min )

We study the problem of preserving privacy while still providing high utility in sequential decision making scenarios in a changing environment. We consider abruptly changing environment: the environment remains constant during periods and it changes at unknown time instants. To formulate this problem, we propose a variant of multi-armed bandits called non-stationary stochastic corrupt bandits. We construct an algorithm called SW-KLUCB-CF and prove an upper bound on its utility using the performance measure of regret. The proven regret upper bound for SW-KLUCB-CF is near-optimal in the number of time steps and matches the best known bound for analogous problems in terms of the number of time steps and the number of changes. Moreover, we present a provably optimal mechanism which can guarantee the desired level of local differential privacy while providing high utility.  ( 2 min )

The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) models depends on the quality of labels. In some areas, the involvement of human annotators may lead to noise in the data. When these corrupted labels are blindly regarded as the ground truth (GT), DL models suffer from performance deficiency. This paper presents a method that aims to learn a confident model in the presence of noisy labels. This is done in conjunction with estimating the uncertainty of multiple annotators. We robustly estimate the predictions given only the noisy labels by adding entropy or information-based regularizer to the classifier network. We conduct our experiments on a noisy version of MNIST, CIFAR-10, and FMNIST datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method as it outperforms or performs comparably to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluated the proposed method on the curated dataset, where the noise type and level of various annotators depend on the input image style. We show that our approach performs well and is adept at learning annotators' confusion. Moreover, we demonstrate how our model is more confident in predicting GT than other baselines. Finally, we assess our approach for segmentation problem and showcase its effectiveness with experiments.  ( 2 min )

In both terrestrial and marine ecology, physical tagging is a frequently used method to study population dynamics and behavior. However, such tagging techniques are increasingly being replaced by individual re-identification using image analysis. This paper introduces a contrastive learning-based model for identifying individuals. The model uses the first parts of the Inception v3 network, supported by a projection head, and we use contrastive learning to find similar or dissimilar image pairs from a collection of uniform photographs. We apply this technique for corkwing wrasse, Symphodus melops, an ecologically and commercially important fish species. Photos are taken during repeated catches of the same individuals from a wild population, where the intervals between individual sightings might range from a few days to several years. Our model achieves a one-shot accuracy of 0.35, a 5-shot accuracy of 0.56, and a 100-shot accuracy of 0.88, on our dataset.  ( 2 min )

Directed information (DI) is a fundamental measure for the study and analysis of sequential stochastic models. In particular, when optimized over input distributions it characterizes the capacity of general communication channels. However, analytic computation of DI is typically intractable and existing optimization techniques over discrete input alphabets require knowledge of the channel model, which renders them inapplicable when only samples are available. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel estimation-optimization framework for DI over discrete input spaces. We formulate DI optimization as a Markov decision process and leverage reinforcement learning techniques to optimize a deep generative model of the input process probability mass function (PMF). Combining this optimizer with the recently developed DI neural estimator, we obtain an end-to-end estimation-optimization algorithm which is applied to estimating the (feedforward and feedback) capacity of various discrete channels with memory. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use the optimized PMF model to (i) obtain theoretical bounds on the feedback capacity of unifilar finite-state channels; and (ii) perform probabilistic shaping of constellations in the peak power-constrained additive white Gaussian noise channel.  ( 2 min )

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.  ( 2 min )

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.  ( 2 min )

Real-world applications often require learning continuously from a stream of data under ever-changing conditions. When trying to learn from such non-stationary data, deep neural networks (DNNs) undergo catastrophic forgetting of previously learned information. Among the common approaches to avoid catastrophic forgetting, rehearsal-based methods have proven effective. However, they are still prone to forgetting due to task-interference as all parameters respond to all tasks. To counter this, we take inspiration from sparse coding in the brain and introduce dynamic modularity and sparsity (Dynamos) for rehearsal-based general continual learning. In this setup, the DNN learns to respond to stimuli by activating relevant subsets of neurons. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Dynamos on multiple datasets under challenging continual learning evaluation protocols. Finally, we show that our method learns representations that are modular and specialized, while maintaining reusability by activating subsets of neurons with overlaps corresponding to the similarity of stimuli.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we investigate the joint device activity and data detection in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) with a one-phase non-coherent scheme, where data bits are embedded in the pilot sequences and the base station simultaneously detects active devices and their embedded data bits without explicit channel estimation. Due to the correlated sparsity pattern introduced by the non-coherent transmission scheme, the traditional approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm cannot achieve satisfactory performance. Therefore, we propose a deep learning (DL) modified AMP network (DL-mAMPnet) that enhances the detection performance by effectively exploiting the pilot activity correlation. The DL-mAMPnet is constructed by unfolding the AMP algorithm into a feedforward neural network, which combines the principled mathematical model of the AMP algorithm with the powerful learning capability, thereby benefiting from the advantages of both techniques. Trainable parameters are introduced in the DL-mAMPnet to approximate the correlated sparsity pattern and the large-scale fading coefficient. Moreover, a refinement module is designed to further advance the performance by utilizing the spatial feature caused by the correlated sparsity pattern. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DL-mAMPnet can significantly outperform traditional algorithms in terms of the symbol error rate performance.  ( 2 min )

Vocal Bursts -- short, non-speech vocalizations that convey emotions, such as laughter, cries, sighs, moans, and groans -- are an often-overlooked aspect of speech emotion recognition, but an important aspect of human vocal communication. One barrier to study of these interesting vocalizations is a lack of large datasets. I am pleased to introduce the EmoGator dataset, which consists of 32,040 samples from 365 speakers, 16.91 hours of audio; each sample classified into one of 30 distinct emotion categories by the speaker. Several different approaches to construct classifiers to identify emotion categories will be discussed, and directions for future research will be suggested. Data set is available for download from https://github.com/fredbuhl/EmoGator.  ( 2 min )

We introduce Argoverse 2 (AV2) - a collection of three datasets for perception and forecasting research in the self-driving domain. The annotated Sensor Dataset contains 1,000 sequences of multimodal data, encompassing high-resolution imagery from seven ring cameras, and two stereo cameras in addition to lidar point clouds, and 6-DOF map-aligned pose. Sequences contain 3D cuboid annotations for 26 object categories, all of which are sufficiently-sampled to support training and evaluation of 3D perception models. The Lidar Dataset contains 20,000 sequences of unlabeled lidar point clouds and map-aligned pose. This dataset is the largest ever collection of lidar sensor data and supports self-supervised learning and the emerging task of point cloud forecasting. Finally, the Motion Forecasting Dataset contains 250,000 scenarios mined for interesting and challenging interactions between the autonomous vehicle and other actors in each local scene. Models are tasked with the prediction of future motion for "scored actors" in each scenario and are provided with track histories that capture object location, heading, velocity, and category. In all three datasets, each scenario contains its own HD Map with 3D lane and crosswalk geometry - sourced from data captured in six distinct cities. We believe these datasets will support new and existing machine learning research problems in ways that existing datasets do not. All datasets are released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.  ( 2 min )

Unsupervised learning-based anomaly detection in latent space has gained importance since discriminating anomalies from normal data becomes difficult in high-dimensional space. Both density estimation and distance-based methods to detect anomalies in latent space have been explored in the past. These methods prove that retaining valuable properties of input data in latent space helps in the better reconstruction of test data. Moreover, real-world sensor data is skewed and non-Gaussian in nature, making mean-based estimators unreliable for skewed data. Again, anomaly detection methods based on reconstruction error rely on Euclidean distance, which does not consider useful correlation information in the feature space and also fails to accurately reconstruct the data when it deviates from the training distribution. In this work, we address the limitations of reconstruction error-based autoencoders and propose a kernelized autoencoder that leverages a robust form of Mahalanobis distance (MD) to measure latent dimension correlation to effectively detect both near and far anomalies. This hybrid loss is aided by the principle of maximizing the mutual information gain between the latent dimension and the high-dimensional prior data space by maximizing the entropy of the latent space while preserving useful correlation information of the original data in the low-dimensional latent space. The multi-objective function has two goals -- it measures correlation information in the latent feature space in the form of robust MD distance and simultaneously tries to preserve useful correlation information from the original data space in the latent space by maximizing mutual information between the prior and latent space.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning is growing fast in academia and industries as a solution to solve data hungriness and privacy issues in machine learning. Being a widely distributed system, federated learning requires various system design thinking. To better design a federated learning system, researchers have introduced multiple patterns and tactics that cover various system design aspects. However, the multitude of patterns leaves the designers confused about when and which pattern to adopt. In this paper, we present a set of decision models for the selection of patterns for federated learning architecture design based on a systematic literature review on federated learning, to assist designers and architects who have limited knowledge of federated learning. Each decision model maps functional and non-functional requirements of federated learning systems to a set of patterns. We also clarify the trade-offs in the patterns. We evaluated the decision models by mapping the decision patterns to concrete federated learning architectures by big tech firms to assess the models' correctness and usefulness. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed decision models are able to bring structure to the federated learning architecture design process and help explicitly articulate the design rationale.  ( 2 min )

Units equivariance (or units covariance) is the exact symmetry that follows from the requirement that relationships among measured quantities of physics relevance must obey self-consistent dimensional scalings. Here, we express this symmetry in terms of a (non-compact) group action, and we employ dimensional analysis and ideas from equivariant machine learning to provide a methodology for exactly units-equivariant machine learning: For any given learning task, we first construct a dimensionless version of its inputs using classic results from dimensional analysis, and then perform inference in the dimensionless space. Our approach can be used to impose units equivariance across a broad range of machine learning methods which are equivariant to rotations and other groups. We discuss the in-sample and out-of-sample prediction accuracy gains one can obtain in contexts like symbolic regression and emulation, where symmetry is important. We illustrate our approach with simple numerical examples involving dynamical systems in physics and ecology.  ( 2 min )

Multi-agent settings remain a fundamental challenge in the reinforcement learning (RL) domain due to the partial observability and the lack of accurate real-time interactions across agents. In this paper, we propose a new method based on local communication learning to tackle the multi-agent RL (MARL) challenge within a large number of agents coexisting. First, we design a new communication protocol that exploits the ability of depthwise convolution to efficiently extract local relations and learn local communication between neighboring agents. To facilitate multi-agent coordination, we explicitly learn the effect of joint actions by taking the policies of neighboring agents as inputs. Second, we introduce the mean-field approximation into our method to reduce the scale of agent interactions. To more effectively coordinate behaviors of neighboring agents, we enhance the mean-field approximation by a supervised policy rectification network (PRN) for rectifying real-time agent interactions and by a learnable compensation term for correcting the approximation bias. The proposed method enables efficient coordination as well as outperforms several baseline approaches on the adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) task and the StarCraft II multi-agent challenge (SMAC).  ( 2 min )

Many areas of deep learning benefit from using increasingly larger neural networks trained on public data, as is the case for pre-trained models for NLP and computer vision. Training such models requires a lot of computational resources (e.g., HPC clusters) that are not available to small research groups and independent researchers. One way to address it is for several smaller groups to pool their computational resources together and train a model that benefits all participants. Unfortunately, in this case, any participant can jeopardize the entire training run by sending incorrect updates, deliberately or by mistake. Training in presence of such peers requires specialized distributed training algorithms with Byzantine tolerance. These algorithms often sacrifice efficiency by introducing redundant communication or passing all updates through a trusted server, making it infeasible to apply them to large-scale deep learning, where models can have billions of parameters. In this work, we propose a novel protocol for secure (Byzantine-tolerant) decentralized training that emphasizes communication efficiency.  ( 2 min )

We propose Distribution Embedding Networks (DEN) for classification with small data. In the same spirit of meta-learning, DEN learns from a diverse set of training tasks with the goal to generalize to unseen target tasks. Unlike existing approaches which require the inputs of training and target tasks to have the same dimension with possibly similar distributions, DEN allows training and target tasks to live in heterogeneous input spaces. This is especially useful for tabular-data tasks where labeled data from related tasks are scarce. DEN uses a three-block architecture: a covariate transformation block followed by a distribution embedding block and then a classification block. We provide theoretical insights to show that this architecture allows the embedding and classification blocks to be fixed after pre-training on a diverse set of tasks; only the covariate transformation block with relatively few parameters needs to be fine-tuned for each new task. To facilitate training, we also propose an approach to synthesize binary classification tasks, and demonstrate that DEN outperforms existing methods in a number of synthetic and real tasks in numerical studies.  ( 2 min )

We address the problem of designing stabilizing control policies for nonlinear systems in discrete-time, while minimizing an arbitrary cost function. When the system is linear and the cost is convex, the System Level Synthesis (SLS) approach offers an effective solution based on convex programming. Beyond this case, a globally optimal solution cannot be found in a tractable way, in general. In this paper, we develop a parametrization of all and only the control policies stabilizing a given time-varying nonlinear system in terms of the combined effect of 1) a strongly stabilizing base controller and 2) a stable SLS operator to be freely designed. Based on this result, we propose a Neural SLS (Neur-SLS) approach guaranteeing closed-loop stability during and after parameter optimization, without requiring any constraints to be satisfied. We exploit recent Deep Neural Network (DNN) models based on Recurrent Equilibrium Networks (RENs) to learn over a rich class of nonlinear stable operators, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in numerical examples.  ( 2 min )

Models in which the covariance matrix has the structure of a sparse matrix plus a low rank perturbation are ubiquitous in machine learning applications. It is often desirable for learning algorithms to take advantage of such structures, avoiding costly matrix computations that often require cubic time and quadratic storage. This is often accomplished by performing operations that maintain such structures, e.g. matrix inversion via the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury formula. In this paper we consider the matrix square root and inverse square root operations. Given a low rank perturbation to a matrix, we argue that a low-rank approximate correction to the (inverse) square root exists. We do so by establishing a geometric decay bound on the true correction's eigenvalues. We then proceed to frame the correction has the solution of an algebraic Ricatti equation, and discuss how a low-rank solution to that equation can be computed. We analyze the approximation error incurred when approximately solving the algebraic Ricatti equation, providing spectral and Frobenius norm forward and backward error bounds. Finally, we describe several applications of our algorithms, and demonstrate their utility in numerical experiments.  ( 2 min )

Neural networks are often utilised in critical domain applications (e.g. self-driving cars, financial markets, and aerospace engineering), even though they exhibit overconfident predictions for ambiguous inputs. This deficiency demonstrates a fundamental flaw indicating that neural networks often overfit on spurious correlations. To address this problem in this work we present two novel objectives that improve the ability of a network to detect out-of-distribution samples and therefore avoid overconfident predictions for ambiguous inputs. We empirically demonstrate that our methods outperform the baseline and perform better than the majority of existing approaches while still maintaining a competitive performance against the rest. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the robustness of our approach against common corruptions and demonstrate the importance of regularisation and auxiliary information in out-of-distribution detection.  ( 2 min )

Progress in continual reinforcement learning has been limited due to several barriers to entry: missing code, high compute requirements, and a lack of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we present CORA, a platform for Continual Reinforcement Learning Agents that provides benchmarks, baselines, and metrics in a single code package. The benchmarks we provide are designed to evaluate different aspects of the continual RL challenge, such as catastrophic forgetting, plasticity, ability to generalize, and sample-efficient learning. Three of the benchmarks utilize video game environments (Atari, Procgen, NetHack). The fourth benchmark, CHORES, consists of four different task sequences in a visually realistic home simulator, drawn from a diverse set of task and scene parameters. To compare continual RL methods on these benchmarks, we prepare three metrics in CORA: Continual Evaluation, Isolated Forgetting, and Zero-Shot Forward Transfer. Finally, CORA includes a set of performant, open-source baselines of existing algorithms for researchers to use and expand on. We release CORA and hope that the continual RL community can benefit from our contributions, to accelerate the development of new continual RL algorithms.  ( 2 min )

Minimizers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two quite distinct popular techniques that have both been employed to analyze categorical biological sequences. At face value, the methods seem entirely dissimilar. Minimizers use min-wise hashing on a rolling window to extract a single important k-mer feature per window. CNNs start with a wide array of randomly initialized convolutional filters, paired with a pooling operation, and then multiple additional neural layers to learn both the filters themselves and how those filters can be used to classify the sequence. In this manuscript, we demonstrate through a careful mathematical analysis of hash function properties that for sequences over a categorical alphabet, random Gaussian initialization of convolutional filters with max-pooling is equivalent to choosing a minimizer ordering such that selected k-mers are (in Hamming distance) far from the k-mers within the sequence but close to other minimizers. In empirical experiments, we find that this property manifests as decreased density in repetitive regions, both in simulation and on real human telomeres. This provides a partial explanation for the effectiveness of CNNs in categorical sequence analysis.  ( 2 min )

Algorithmic fairness is becoming increasingly important in data mining and machine learning. Among others, a foundational notation is group fairness. The vast majority of the existing works on group fairness, with a few exceptions, primarily focus on debiasing with respect to a single sensitive attribute, despite the fact that the co-existence of multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, marital status, etc.) in the real-world is commonplace. As such, methods that can ensure a fair learning outcome with respect to all sensitive attributes of concern simultaneously need to be developed. In this paper, we study the problem of information-theoretic intersectional fairness (InfoFair), where statistical parity, a representative group fairness measure, is guaranteed among demographic groups formed by multiple sensitive attributes of interest. We formulate it as a mutual information minimization problem and propose a generic end-to-end algorithmic framework to solve it. The key idea is to leverage a variational representation of mutual information, which considers the variational distribution between learning outcomes and sensitive attributes, as well as the density ratio between the variational and the original distributions. Our proposed framework is generalizable to many different settings, including other statistical notions of fairness, and could handle any type of learning task equipped with a gradient-based optimizer. Empirical evaluations in the fair classification task on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively debias the classification results with minimal impact to the classification accuracy.  ( 2 min )

Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows logarithmically in the number of arm plays, at a rate governed by the Lai-Robbins lower bound. In this paper, we show that when one uses such optimized designs, the regret distribution of the associated algorithms necessarily has a very heavy tail, specifically, that of a truncated Cauchy distribution. Furthermore, for $p>1$, the $p$'th moment of the regret distribution grows much faster than poly-logarithmically, in particular as a power of the total number of arm plays. We show that optimized UCB bandit designs are also fragile in an additional sense, namely when the problem is even slightly mis-specified, the regret can grow much faster than the conventional theory suggests. Our arguments are based on standard change-of-measure ideas, and indicate that the most likely way that regret becomes larger than expected is when the optimal arm returns below-average rewards in the first few arm plays, thereby causing the algorithm to believe that the arm is sub-optimal. To alleviate the fragility issues exposed, we show that UCB algorithms can be modified so as to ensure a desired degree of robustness to mis-specification. In doing so, we also provide a sharp trade-off between the amount of UCB exploration and the tail exponent of the resulting regret distribution.  ( 2 min )

In this short article, we showcase the derivation of the optimal (minimum error variance) estimator, when one part of the stochastic LTI system output is not measured but is able to be predicted from the measured system outputs. Similar derivations have been done before but not using state-space representation.  ( 2 min )

Privacy-preserving solutions enable companies to offload confidential data to third-party services while fulfilling their government regulations. To accomplish this, they leverage various cryptographic techniques such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE), which allows performing computation on encrypted data. Most HE schemes work in a SIMD fashion, and the data packing method can dramatically affect the running time and memory costs. Finding a packing method that leads to an optimal performant implementation is a hard task. We present a simple and intuitive framework that abstracts the packing decision for the user. We explain its underlying data structures and optimizer, and propose a novel algorithm for performing 2D convolution operations. We used this framework to implement an HE-friendly version of AlexNet, which runs in three minutes, several orders of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art solutions that only use HE.  ( 2 min )

We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) with Sinkhorn distance -- a variant of Wasserstein distance based on entropic regularization. We provide convex programming dual reformulation for a general nominal distribution. Compared with Wasserstein DRO, it is computationally tractable for a larger class of loss functions, and its worst-case distribution is more reasonable. We propose an efficient first-order algorithm with bisection search to solve the dual reformulation. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm finds $\delta$-optimal solution of the new DRO formulation with computation cost $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-3})$ and memory cost $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-2})$, and the computation cost further improves to $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-2})$ when the loss function is smooth. Finally, we provide various numerical examples using both synthetic and real data to demonstrate its competitive performance and light computational speed.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes Friedrichs learning as a novel deep learning methodology that can learn the weak solutions of PDEs via a minmax formulation, which transforms the PDE problem into a minimax optimization problem to identify weak solutions. The name "Friedrichs learning" is for highlighting the close relationship between our learning strategy and Friedrichs theory on symmetric systems of PDEs. The weak solution and the test function in the weak formulation are parameterized as deep neural networks in a mesh-free manner, which are alternately updated to approach the optimal solution networks approximating the weak solution and the optimal test function, respectively. Extensive numerical results indicate that our mesh-free method can provide reasonably good solutions to a wide range of PDEs defined on regular and irregular domains in various dimensions, where classical numerical methods such as finite difference methods and finite element methods may be tedious or difficult to be applied.  ( 2 min )

For Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, many models have been established to characterize their degradation process. The existing empirical or physical models can reveal important information regarding the degradation dynamics. However, there is no general and flexible methods to fuse the information represented by those models. Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) is an efficient tool to fuse empirical or physical dynamic models with data-driven models. To take full advantage of various information sources, we propose a model fusion scheme based on PINN. It is implemented by developing a semi-empirical semi-physical Partial Differential Equation (PDE) to model the degradation dynamics of Li-ion-batteries. When there is little prior knowledge about the dynamics, we leverage the data-driven Deep Hidden Physics Model (DeepHPM) to discover the underlying governing dynamic models. The uncovered dynamics information is then fused with that mined by the surrogate neural network in the PINN framework. Moreover, an uncertainty-based adaptive weighting method is employed to balance the multiple learning tasks when training the PINN. The proposed methods are verified on a public dataset of Li-ion Phosphate (LFP)/graphite batteries.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we establish a mathematically rigorous connection between Causal inference (C-inf) and the low-rank recovery (LRR). Using Random Duality Theory (RDT) concepts developed in [46,48,50] and novel mathematical strategies related to free probability theory, we obtain the exact explicit typical (and achievable) worst case phase transitions (PT). These PT precisely separate scenarios where causal inference via LRR is possible from those where it is not. We supplement our mathematical analysis with numerical experiments that confirm the theoretical predictions of PT phenomena, and further show that the two closely match for fairly small sample sizes. We obtain simple closed form representations for the resulting PTs, which highlight direct relations between the low rankness of the target C-inf matrix and the time of the treatment. Hence, our results can be used to determine the range of C-inf's typical applicability.  ( 2 min )

Projection robust Wasserstein (PRW) distance, or Wasserstein projection pursuit (WPP), is a robust variant of the Wasserstein distance. Recent work suggests that this quantity is more robust than the standard Wasserstein distance, in particular when comparing probability measures in high-dimensions. However, it is ruled out for practical application because the optimization model is essentially non-convex and non-smooth which makes the computation intractable. Our contribution in this paper is to revisit the original motivation behind WPP/PRW, but take the hard route of showing that, despite its non-convexity and lack of nonsmoothness, and even despite some hardness results proved by~\citet{Niles-2019-Estimation} in a minimax sense, the original formulation for PRW/WPP \textit{can} be efficiently computed in practice using Riemannian optimization, yielding in relevant cases better behavior than its convex relaxation. More specifically, we provide three simple algorithms with solid theoretical guarantee on their complexity bound (one in the appendix), and demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency by conducing extensive experiments on synthetic and real data. This paper provides a first step into a computational theory of the PRW distance and provides the links between optimal transport and Riemannian optimization.  ( 3 min )

The application of deep learning algorithms to financial data is difficult due to heavy non-stationarities which can lead to over-fitted models that underperform under regime changes. Using the Numerai tournament data set as a motivating example, we propose a machine learning pipeline for trading market-neutral stock portfolios based on tabular data which is robust under changes in market conditions. We evaluate various machine-learning models, including Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and Neural Networks with and without simple feature engineering, as the building blocks for the pipeline. We find that GBDT models with dropout display high performance, robustness and generalisability with relatively low complexity and reduced computational cost. We then show that online learning techniques can be used in post-prediction processing to enhance the results. In particular, dynamic feature neutralisation, an efficient procedure that requires no retraining of models and can be applied post-prediction to any machine learning model, improves robustness by reducing drawdown in volatile market conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the creation of model ensembles through dynamic model selection based on recent model performance leads to improved performance over baseline by improving the Sharpe and Calmar ratios. We also evaluate the robustness of our pipeline across different data splits and random seeds with good reproducibility of results.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we revisit and further explore a mathematically rigorous connection between Causal inference (C-inf) and the Low-rank recovery (LRR) established in [10]. Leveraging the Random duality - Free probability theory (RDT-FPT) connection, we obtain the exact explicit typical C-inf asymmetric phase transitions (PT). We uncover a doubling low-rankness phenomenon, which means that exactly two times larger low rankness is allowed in asymmetric scenarios compared to the symmetric worst case ones considered in [10]. Consequently, the final PT mathematical expressions are as elegant as those obtained in [10], and highlight direct relations between the targeted C-inf matrix low rankness and the time of treatment. Our results have strong implications for applications, where C-inf matrices are not necessarily symmetric.  ( 2 min )

The latent space of autoencoders has been improved for clustering image data by jointly learning a t-distributed embedding with a clustering algorithm inspired by the neighborhood embedding concept proposed for data visualization. However, multivariate tabular data pose different challenges in representation learning than image data, where traditional machine learning is often superior to deep tabular data learning. In this paper, we address the challenges of learning tabular data in contrast to image data and present a novel Gaussian Cluster Embedding in Autoencoder Latent Space (G-CEALS) algorithm by replacing t-distributions with multivariate Gaussian clusters. Unlike current methods, the proposed approach independently defines the Gaussian embedding and the target cluster distribution to accommodate any clustering algorithm in representation learning. A trained G-CEALS model extracts a quality embedding for unseen test data. Based on the embedding clustering accuracy, the average rank of the proposed G-CEALS method is 1.4 (0.7), which is superior to all eight baseline clustering and cluster embedding methods on seven tabular data sets. This paper shows one of the first algorithms to jointly learn embedding and clustering to improve multivariate tabular data representation in downstream clustering.  ( 2 min )

Theoretical properties of bilevel problems are well studied when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. In this work, we focus on bilevel optimization problems without the strong-convexity assumption. In these cases, we first show that the common local optimality measures such as KKT condition or regularization can lead to undesired consequences. Then, we aim to identify the mildest conditions that make bilevel problems tractable. We identify two classes of growth conditions on the lower-level objective that leads to continuity. Under these assumptions, we show that the local optimality of the bilevel problem can be defined via the Goldstein stationarity condition of the hyper-objective. We then propose the Inexact Gradient-Free Method (IGFM) to solve the bilevel problem, using an approximate zeroth order oracle that is of independent interest. Our non-asymptotic analysis demonstrates that the proposed method can find a $(\delta, \varepsilon)$ Goldstein stationary point for bilevel problems with a zeroth order oracle complexity that is polynomial in $d, 1/\delta$ and $1/\varepsilon$.  ( 2 min )

An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.  ( 2 min )

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io  ( 2 min )

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.  ( 3 min )

The shift of public debate to the digital sphere has been accompanied by a rise in online hate speech. While many promising approaches for hate speech classification have been proposed, studies often focus only on a single language, usually English, and do not address three key concerns: post-deployment performance, classifier maintenance and infrastructural limitations. In this paper, we introduce a new human-in-the-loop BERT-based hate speech classification pipeline and trace its development from initial data collection and annotation all the way to post-deployment. Our classifier, trained using data from our original corpus of over 422k examples, is specifically developed for the inherently multilingual setting of Switzerland and outperforms with its F1 score of 80.5 the currently best-performing BERT-based multilingual classifier by 5.8 F1 points in German and 3.6 F1 points in French. Our systematic evaluations over a 12-month period further highlight the vital importance of continuous, human-in-the-loop classifier maintenance to ensure robust hate speech classification post-deployment.  ( 2 min )

Data-driven neighborhood definitions and graph constructions are often used in machine learning and signal processing applications. k-nearest neighbor~(kNN) and $\epsilon$-neighborhood methods are among the most common methods used for neighborhood selection, due to their computational simplicity. However, the choice of parameters associated with these methods, such as k and $\epsilon$, is still ad hoc. We make two main contributions in this paper. First, we present an alternative view of neighborhood selection, where we show that neighborhood construction is equivalent to a sparse signal approximation problem. Second, we propose an algorithm, non-negative kernel regression~(NNK), for obtaining neighborhoods that lead to better sparse representation. NNK draws similarities to the orthogonal matching pursuit approach to signal representation and possesses desirable geometric and theoretical properties. Experiments demonstrate (i) the robustness of the NNK algorithm for neighborhood and graph construction, (ii) its ability to adapt the number of neighbors to the data properties, and (iii) its superior performance in local neighborhood and graph-based machine learning tasks.  ( 2 min )

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations.  ( 2 min )

We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. When executing SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, we can reach 60% sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning has recently been applied to recommendation systems to protect user privacy. In federated learning settings, recommendation systems can train recommendation models only collecting the intermediate parameters instead of the real user data, which greatly enhances the user privacy. Beside, federated recommendation systems enable to collaborate with other data platforms to improve recommended model performance while meeting the regulation and privacy constraints. However, federated recommendation systems faces many new challenges such as privacy, security, heterogeneity and communication costs. While significant research has been conducted in these areas, gaps in the surveying literature still exist. In this survey, we-(1) summarize some common privacy mechanisms used in federated recommendation systems and discuss the advantages and limitations of each mechanism; (2) review some robust aggregation strategies and several novel attacks against security; (3) summarize some approaches to address heterogeneity and communication costs problems; (4)introduce some open source platforms that can be used to build federated recommendation systems; (5) present some prospective research directions in the future. This survey can guide researchers and practitioners understand the research progress in these areas.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.  ( 2 min )

Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly degrade the performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm -- robust consensus clustering that can find common ground truth among experts' opinions, which tends to be minimally affected by the bias caused by the outliers. In particular, we formalize the robust consensus clustering problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then derive an effective algorithm upon alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous convergence guarantee. Our method outperforms the baselines on benchmarks. We apply the proposed method to the real-world advertising campaign segmentation and forecasting tasks using the proposed consensus clustering results based on the similarity computed via Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics. The accurate clustering result is helpful for building the advertiser profiles so as to perform the forecasting.  ( 2 min )

Product ranking is the core problem for revenue-maximizing online retailers. To design proper product ranking algorithms, various consumer choice models are proposed to characterize the consumers' behaviors when they are provided with a list of products. However, existing works assume that each consumer purchases at most one product or will keep viewing the product list after purchasing a product, which does not agree with the common practice in real scenarios. In this paper, we assume that each consumer can purchase multiple products at will. To model consumers' willingness to view and purchase, we set a random attention span and purchase budget, which determines the maximal amount of products that he/she views and purchases, respectively. Under this setting, we first design an optimal ranking policy when the online retailer can precisely model consumers' behaviors. Based on the policy, we further develop the Multiple-Purchase-with-Budget UCB (MPB-UCB) algorithms with $\~O(\sqrt{T})$ regret that estimate consumers' behaviors and maximize revenue simultaneously in online settings. Experiments on both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.  ( 2 min )

In this work a novel recommender system (RS) for Tourism is presented. The RS is context aware as is now the rule in the state-of-the-art for recommender systems and works on top of a tourism ontology which is used to group the different items being offered. The presented RS mixes different types of recommenders creating an ensemble which changes on the basis of the RS's maturity. Starting from simple content-based recommendations and iteratively adding popularity, demographic and collaborative filtering methods as rating density and user cardinality increases. The result is a RS that mutates during its lifetime and uses a tourism ontology and natural language processing (NLP) to correctly bin the items to specific item categories and meta categories in the ontology. This item classification facilitates the association between user preferences and items, as well as allowing to better classify and group the items being offered, which in turn is particularly useful for context-aware filtering.  ( 2 min )

Sparse regression has been a popular approach to perform variable selection and enhance the prediction accuracy and interpretability of the resulting statistical model. Existing approaches focus on offline regularized regression, while the online scenario has rarely been studied. In this paper, we propose a novel online sparse linear regression framework for analyzing streaming data when data points arrive sequentially. Our proposed method is memory efficient and requires less stringent restricted strong convexity assumptions. Theoretically, we show that with a properly chosen regularization parameter, the $\ell_2$-norm statistical error of our estimator diminishes to zero in the optimal order of $\tilde{O}({\sqrt{s/t}})$, where $s$ is the sparsity level, $t$ is the streaming sample size, and $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ hides logarithmic terms. Numerical experiments demonstrate the practical efficiency of our algorithm.  ( 2 min )

Real-life tools for decision-making in many critical domains are based on ranking results. With the increasing awareness of algorithmic fairness, recent works have presented measures for fairness in ranking. Many of those definitions consider the representation of different ``protected groups'', in the top-$k$ ranked items, for any reasonable $k$. Given the protected groups, confirming algorithmic fairness is a simple task. However, the groups' definitions may be unknown in advance. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting groups with biased representation in the top-$k$ ranked items, eliminating the need to pre-define protected groups. The number of such groups possible can be exponential, making the problem hard. We propose efficient search algorithms for two different fairness measures: global representation bounds, and proportional representation. Then we propose a method to explain the bias in the representations of groups utilizing the notion of Shapley values. We conclude with an experimental study, showing the scalability of our approach and demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed algorithms.  ( 2 min )

Did you know that over 70 million of Dota2 players have their in-game data freely accessible? What if such data is used in malicious ways? This paper is the first to investigate such a problem. Motivated by the widespread popularity of video games, we propose the first threat model for Attribute Inference Attacks (AIA) in the Dota2 context. We explain how (and why) attackers can exploit the abundant public data in the Dota2 ecosystem to infer private information about its players. Due to lack of concrete evidence on the efficacy of our AIA, we empirically prove and assess their impact in reality. By conducting an extensive survey on $\sim$500 Dota2 players spanning over 26k matches, we verify whether a correlation exists between a player's Dota2 activity and their real-life. Then, after finding such a link ($p\!0.3$), we ethically perform diverse AIA. We leverage the capabilities of machine learning to infer real-life attributes of the respondents of our survey by using their publicly available in-game data. Our results show that, by applying domain expertise, some AIA can reach up to 98% precision and over 90% accuracy. This paper hence raises the alarm on a subtle, but concrete threat that can potentially affect the entire competitive gaming landscape. We alerted the developers of Dota2.  ( 2 min )

Recent advances in computer vision have shown promising results in image generation. Diffusion probabilistic models in particular have generated realistic images from textual input, as demonstrated by DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion. However, their use in medicine, where image data typically comprises three-dimensional volumes, has not been systematically evaluated. Synthetic images may play a crucial role in privacy preserving artificial intelligence and can also be used to augment small datasets. Here we show that diffusion probabilistic models can synthesize high quality medical imaging data, which we show for Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. We provide quantitative measurements of their performance through a reader study with two medical experts who rated the quality of the synthesized images in three categories: Realistic image appearance, anatomical correctness and consistency between slices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that synthetic images can be used in a self-supervised pre-training and improve the performance of breast segmentation models when data is scarce (dice score 0.91 vs. 0.95 without vs. with synthetic data).  ( 2 min )

The problem of approximating the Pareto front of a multiobjective optimization problem can be reformulated as the problem of finding a set that maximizes the hypervolume indicator. This paper establishes the analytical expression of the Hessian matrix of the mapping from a (fixed size) collection of $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional decision space (or $m$ dimensional objective space) to the scalar hypervolume indicator value. To define the Hessian matrix, the input set is vectorized, and the matrix is derived by analytical differentiation of the mapping from a vectorized set to the hypervolume indicator. The Hessian matrix plays a crucial role in second-order methods, such as the Newton-Raphson optimization method, and it can be used for the verification of local optimal sets. So far, the full analytical expression was only established and analyzed for the relatively simple bi-objective case. This paper will derive the full expression for arbitrary dimensions ($m\geq2$ objective functions). For the practically important three-dimensional case, we also provide an asymptotically efficient algorithm with time complexity in $O(n\log n)$ for the exact computation of the Hessian Matrix' non-zero entries. We establish a sharp bound of $12m-6$ for the number of non-zero entries. Also, for the general $m$-dimensional case, a compact recursive analytical expression is established, and its algorithmic implementation is discussed. Also, for the general case, some sparsity results can be established; these results are implied by the recursive expression. To validate and illustrate the analytically derived algorithms and results, we provide a few numerical examples using Python and Mathematica implementations. Open-source implementations of the algorithms and testing data are made available as a supplement to this paper.  ( 2 min )

Pseudo Artificial Intelligence bias (PAIB) is broadly disseminated in the literature, which can result in unnecessary AI fear in society, exacerbate the enduring inequities and disparities in access to and sharing the benefits of AI applications, and waste social capital invested in AI research. This study systematically reviews publications in the literature to present three types of PAIBs identified due to: a) misunderstandings, b) pseudo mechanical bias, and c) over-expectations. We discussed the consequences of and solutions to PAIBs, including certifying users for AI applications to mitigate AI fears, providing customized user guidance for AI applications, and developing systematic approaches to monitor bias. We concluded that PAIB due to misunderstandings, pseudo mechanical bias, and over-expectations of algorithmic predictions is socially harmful.  ( 2 min )

We present temporally layered architecture (TLA), a biologically inspired system for temporally adaptive distributed control. TLA layers a fast and a slow controller together to achieve temporal abstraction that allows each layer to focus on a different time-scale. Our design is biologically inspired and draws on the architecture of the human brain which executes actions at different timescales depending on the environment's demands. Such distributed control design is widespread across biological systems because it increases survivability and accuracy in certain and uncertain environments. We demonstrate that TLA can provide many advantages over existing approaches, including persistent exploration, adaptive control, explainable temporal behavior, compute efficiency and distributed control. We present two different algorithms for training TLA: (a) Closed-loop control, where the fast controller is trained over a pre-trained slow controller, allowing better exploration for the fast controller and closed-loop control where the fast controller decides whether to "act-or-not" at each timestep; and (b) Partially open loop control, where the slow controller is trained over a pre-trained fast controller, allowing for open loop-control where the slow controller picks a temporally extended action or defers the next n-actions to the fast controller. We evaluated our method on a suite of continuous control tasks and demonstrate the advantages of TLA over several strong baselines.  ( 2 min )

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.  ( 3 min )

We address the challenge of building domain-specific knowledge models for industrial use cases, where labelled data and taxonomic information is initially scarce. Our focus is on inductive link prediction models as a basis for practical tools that support knowledge engineers with exploring text collections and discovering and linking new (so-called open-world) entities to the knowledge graph. We argue that - though neural approaches to text mining have yielded impressive results in the past years - current benchmarks do not reflect the typical challenges encountered in the industrial wild properly. Therefore, our first contribution is an open benchmark coined IRT2 (inductive reasoning with text) that (1) covers knowledge graphs of varying sizes (including very small ones), (2) comes with incidental, low-quality text mentions, and (3) includes not only triple completion but also ranking, which is relevant for supporting experts with discovery tasks. We investigate two neural models for inductive link prediction, one based on end-to-end learning and one that learns from the knowledge graph and text data in separate steps. These models compete with a strong bag-of-words baseline. The results show a significant advance in performance for the neural approaches as soon as the available graph data decreases for linking. For ranking, the results are promising, and the neural approaches outperform the sparse retriever by a wide margin.  ( 2 min )

Many e-commerce marketplaces offer their users fast delivery options for free to meet the increasing needs of users, imposing an excessive burden on city logistics. Therefore, understanding e-commerce users' preference for delivery options is a key to designing logistics policies. To this end, this study designs a stated choice survey in which respondents are faced with choice tasks among different delivery options and time slots, which was completed by 4,062 users from the three major metropolitan areas in Japan. To analyze the data, mixed logit models capturing taste heterogeneity as well as flexible substitution patterns have been estimated. The model estimation results indicate that delivery attributes including fee, time, and time slot size are significant determinants of the delivery option choices. Associations between users' preferences and socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, teleworking frequency and the presence of a delivery box, were also suggested. Moreover, we analyzed two willingness-to-pay measures for delivery, namely, the value of delivery time savings (VODT) and the value of time slot shortening (VOTS), and applied a non-semiparametric approach to estimate their distributions in a data-oriented manner. Although VODT has a large heterogeneity among respondents, the estimated median VODT is 25.6 JPY/day, implying that more than half of the respondents would wait an additional day if the delivery fee were increased by only 26 JPY, that is, they do not necessarily need a fast delivery option but often request it when cheap or almost free. Moreover, VOTS was found to be low, distributed with the median of 5.0 JPY/hour; that is, users do not highly value the reduction in time slot size in monetary terms. These findings on e-commerce users' preferences can help in designing levels of service for last-mile delivery to significantly improve its efficiency.  ( 2 min )

This paper investigates the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to solve differential equations (DEs) and the construction of the loss function which meets both differential equation and its initial/boundary condition of a certain DE. In section 2, the loss function is generalized to $n^\text{th}$ order ordinary differential equation(ODE). Other methods of construction are examined in Section 3 and applied to three different models to assess their effectiveness.  ( 2 min )

Influenced mixed moving average fields are a versatile modeling class for spatio-temporal data. However, their predictive distribution is not generally accessible. Under this modeling assumption, we define a novel theory-guided machine learning approach that employs a generalized Bayesian algorithm to make predictions. We employ a Lipschitz predictor, for example, a linear model or a feed-forward neural network, and determine a randomized estimator by minimizing a novel PAC Bayesian bound for data serially correlated along a spatial and temporal dimension. Performing causal future predictions is a highlight of our methodology as its potential application to data with short and long-range dependence. We conclude by showing the performance of the learning methodology in an example with linear predictors and simulated spatio-temporal data from an STOU process.  ( 2 min )

Many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems require designing a distribution of tasks that can be applied to train effective policies. This distribution of tasks can be specified by the curriculum. A curriculum is meant to improve the results of learning and accelerate it. We introduce Success Induced Task Prioritization (SITP), a framework for automatic curriculum learning, where a task sequence is created based on the success rate of each task. In this setting, each task is an algorithmically created environment instance with a unique configuration. The algorithm selects the order of tasks that provide the fastest learning for agents. The probability of selecting any of the tasks for the next stage of learning is determined by evaluating its performance score in previous stages. Experiments were carried out in the Partially Observable Grid Environment for Multiple Agents (POGEMA) and Procgen benchmark. We demonstrate that SITP matches or surpasses the results of other curriculum design methods. Our method can be implemented with handful of minor modifications to any standard RL framework and provides useful prioritization with minimal computational overhead.  ( 2 min )

Embedding words in vector space is a fundamental first step in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP). Typical NLP solutions employ pre-defined vector representations to improve generalization by co-locating similar words in vector space. For instance, Word2Vec is a self-supervised predictive model that captures the context of words using a neural network. Similarly, GLoVe is a popular unsupervised model incorporating corpus-wide word co-occurrence statistics. Such word embedding has significantly boosted important NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, document classification, and machine translation. However, the embeddings are dense floating-point vectors, making them expensive to compute and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we instead propose to represent the semantics of words with a few defining words that are related using propositional logic. To produce such logical embeddings, we introduce a Tsetlin Machine-based autoencoder that learns logical clauses self-supervised. The clauses consist of contextual words like "black," "cup," and "hot" to define other words like "coffee," thus being human-understandable. We evaluate our embedding approach on several intrinsic and extrinsic benchmarks, outperforming GLoVe on six classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the interpretability of our embedding using the logical representations acquired during training. We also visualize word clusters in vector space, demonstrating how our logical embedding co-locate similar words.  ( 2 min )

In contrast to the control-theoretic methods, the lack of stability guarantee remains a significant problem for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Jointly learning a policy and a Lyapunov function has recently become a promising approach to ensuring the whole system with a stability guarantee. However, the classical Lyapunov constraints researchers introduced cannot stabilize the system during the sampling-based optimization. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Stability Certification (ASC), making the system reach sampling-based stability. Because the ASC condition can search for the optimal policy heuristically, we design the Adaptive Lyapunov-based Actor-Critic (ALAC) algorithm based on the ASC condition. Meanwhile, our algorithm avoids the optimization problem that a variety of constraints are coupled into the objective in current approaches. When evaluated on ten robotic tasks, our method achieves lower accumulated cost and fewer stability constraint violations than previous studies.  ( 2 min )

Existing federated classification algorithms typically assume the local annotations at every client cover the same set of classes. In this paper, we aim to lift such an assumption and focus on a more general yet practical non-IID setting where every client can work on non-identical and even disjoint sets of classes (i.e., client-exclusive classes), and the clients have a common goal which is to build a global classification model to identify the union of these classes. Such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new challenge: how to ensure different clients are operating in the same latent space so as to avoid the drift after aggregation? We observe that the classes can be described in natural languages (i.e., class names) and these names are typically safe to share with all parties. Thus, we formulate the classification problem as a matching process between data representations and class representations and break the classification model into a data encoder and a label encoder. We leverage the natural-language class names as the common ground to anchor the class representations in the label encoder. In each iteration, the label encoder updates the class representations and regulates the data representations through matching. We further use the updated class representations at each round to annotate data samples for locally-unaware classes according to similarity and distill knowledge to local models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method can outperform various classical and state-of-the-art federated learning methods designed for learning with non-IID data.  ( 2 min )

Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its huge potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied AI has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant researchers. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this paper, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. With these, we further propose to collect human demonstrations and imitate the action patterns to achieve more effective policy learning. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features and tasks, and validate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms using the interactive environment. Promising results are obtained, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our platform is released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL/  ( 2 min )

Existing measures and representations for trajectories have two longstanding fundamental shortcomings, i.e., they are computationally expensive and they can not guarantee the `uniqueness' property of a distance function: dist(X,Y) = 0 if and only if X=Y, where $X$ and $Y$ are two trajectories. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful way to represent trajectories and measure the similarity between two trajectories using a distributional kernel to address these shortcomings. It is a principled approach based on kernel mean embedding which has a strong theoretical underpinning. It has three distinctive features in comparison with existing approaches. (1) A distributional kernel is used for the very first time for trajectory representation and similarity measurement. (2) It does not rely on point-to-point distances which are used in most existing distances for trajectories. (3) It requires no learning, unlike existing learning and deep learning approaches. We show the generality of this new approach in three applications: (a) trajectory anomaly detection, (b) anomalous sub-trajectory detection, and (c) trajectory pattern mining. We identify that the distributional kernel has (i) a unique data-dependent property and the above uniqueness property which are the key factors that lead to its superior task-specific performance; and (ii) runtime orders of magnitude faster than existing distance measures.  ( 2 min )

We propose Hierarchical ProtoPNet: an interpretable network that explains its reasoning process by considering the hierarchical relationship between classes. Different from previous methods that explain their reasoning process by dissecting the input image and finding the prototypical parts responsible for the classification, we propose to explain the reasoning process for video action classification by dissecting the input video frames on multiple levels of the class hierarchy. The explanations leverage the hierarchy to deal with uncertainty, akin to human reasoning: When we observe water and human activity, but no definitive action it can be recognized as the water sports parent class. Only after observing a person swimming can we definitively refine it to the swimming action. Experiments on ActivityNet and UCF-101 show performance improvements while providing multi-level explanations.  ( 2 min )

Projection operations are a typical computation bottleneck in online learning. In this paper, we enable projection-free online learning within the framework of Online Convex Optimization with Memory (OCO-M) -- OCO-M captures how the history of decisions affects the current outcome by allowing the online learning loss functions to depend on both current and past decisions. Particularly, we introduce the first projection-free meta-base learning algorithm with memory that minimizes dynamic regret, i.e., that minimizes the suboptimality against any sequence of time-varying decisions. We are motivated by artificial intelligence applications where autonomous agents need to adapt to time-varying environments in real-time, accounting for how past decisions affect the present. Examples of such applications are: online control of dynamical systems; statistical arbitrage; and time series prediction. The algorithm builds on the Online Frank-Wolfe (OFW) and Hedge algorithms. We demonstrate how our algorithm can be applied to the online control of linear time-varying systems in the presence of unpredictable process noise. To this end, we develop the first controller with memory and bounded dynamic regret against any optimal time-varying linear feedback control policy. We validate our algorithm in simulated scenarios of online control of linear time-invariant systems.  ( 2 min )

The growing interest in intelligent services and privacy protection for mobile devices has given rise to the widespread application of federated learning in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Diverse user behaviors call for personalized services with heterogeneous Machine Learning (ML) models on different devices. Federated Multi-task Learning (FMTL) is proposed to train related but personalized ML models for different devices, whereas previous works suffer from excessive communication overhead during training and neglect the model heterogeneity among devices in MEC. Introducing knowledge distillation into FMTL can simultaneously enable efficient communication and model heterogeneity among clients, whereas existing methods rely on a public dataset, which is impractical in reality. To tackle this dilemma, Federated MultI-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge CompuTing (FedICT) is proposed. FedICT direct local-global knowledge aloof during bi-directional distillation processes between clients and the server, aiming to enable multi-task clients while alleviating client drift derived from divergent optimization directions of client-side local models. Specifically, FedICT includes Federated Prior Knowledge Distillation (FPKD) and Local Knowledge Adjustment (LKA). FPKD is proposed to reinforce the clients' fitting of local data by introducing prior knowledge of local data distributions. Moreover, LKA is proposed to correct the distillation loss of the server, making the transferred local knowledge better match the generalized representation. Experiments on three datasets show that FedICT significantly outperforms all compared benchmarks in various data heterogeneous and model architecture settings, achieving improved accuracy with less than 1.2% training communication overhead compared with FedAvg and no more than 75% training communication round compared with FedGKT.  ( 2 min )

Drug dosing is an important application of AI, which can be formulated as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem. In this paper, we identify two major challenges of using RL for drug dosing: delayed and prolonged effects of administering medications, which break the Markov assumption of the RL framework. We focus on prolongedness and define PAE-POMDP (Prolonged Action Effect-Partially Observable Markov Decision Process), a subclass of POMDPs in which the Markov assumption does not hold specifically due to prolonged effects of actions. Motivated by the pharmacology literature, we propose a simple and effective approach to converting drug dosing PAE-POMDPs into MDPs, enabling the use of the existing RL algorithms to solve such problems. We validate the proposed approach on a toy task, and a challenging glucose control task, for which we devise a clinically-inspired reward function. Our results demonstrate that: (1) the proposed method to restore the Markov assumption leads to significant improvements over a vanilla baseline; (2) the approach is competitive with recurrent policies which may inherently capture the prolonged effect of actions; (3) it is remarkably more time and memory efficient than the recurrent baseline and hence more suitable for real-time dosing control systems; and (4) it exhibits favorable qualitative behavior in our policy analysis.  ( 2 min )

Modern deep neural networks have achieved superhuman performance in tasks from image classification to game play. Surprisingly, these various complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same remarkable structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets. This phenomenon is known as "Neural Collapse," and it was discovered empirically by Papyan et al. \cite{Papyan20}. Recent papers have theoretically shown the global solutions to the training network problem under a simplified "unconstrained feature model" exhibiting this phenomenon. We take a step further and prove the Neural Collapse occurrence for deep linear network for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) loss. Furthermore, we extend our research to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis for Neural Collapse under this setting.  ( 2 min )

As natural language processing (NLP) for gender bias becomes a significant interdisciplinary topic, the prevalent data-driven techniques such as large-scale language models suffer from data inadequacy and biased corpus, especially for languages with insufficient resources such as Chinese. To this end, we propose a Chinese cOrpus foR Gender bIas Probing and Mitigation CORGI-PM, which contains 32.9k sentences with high-quality labels derived by following an annotation scheme specifically developed for gender bias in the Chinese context. Moreover, we address three challenges for automatic textual gender bias mitigation, which requires the models to detect, classify, and mitigate textual gender bias. We also conduct experiments with state-of-the-art language models to provide baselines. To our best knowledge, CORGI-PM is the first sentence-level Chinese corpus for gender bias probing and mitigation.  ( 2 min )

This paper illustrates the technologies of user next intent prediction with a concept knowledge graph. The system has been deployed on the Web at Alipay, serving more than 100 million daily active users. Specifically, we propose AlipayKG to explicitly characterize user intent, which is an offline concept knowledge graph in the Life-Service domain modeling the historical behaviors of users, the rich content interacted by users and the relations between them. We further introduce a Transformer-based model which integrates expert rules from the knowledge graph to infer the online user's next intent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively enhance the performance of the downstream tasks while retaining explainability.  ( 2 min )

Learning the underlying distribution of molecular graphs and generating high-fidelity samples is a fundamental research problem in drug discovery and material science. However, accurately modeling distribution and rapidly generating novel molecular graphs remain crucial and challenging goals. To accomplish these goals, we propose a novel Conditional Diffusion model based on discrete Graph Structures (CDGS) for molecular graph generation. Specifically, we construct a forward graph diffusion process on both graph structures and inherent features through stochastic differential equations (SDE) and derive discrete graph structures as the condition for reverse generative processes. We present a specialized hybrid graph noise prediction model that extracts the global context and the local node-edge dependency from intermediate graph states. We further utilize ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for efficient graph sampling, based on the semi-linear structure of the probability flow ODE. Experiments on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework. Particularly, the proposed method still generates high-quality molecular graphs in a limited number of steps.  ( 2 min )

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.  ( 2 min )

Classical methods for acoustic scene mapping require the estimation of time difference of arrival (TDOA) between microphones. Unfortunately, TDOA estimation is very sensitive to reverberation and additive noise. We introduce an unsupervised data-driven approach that exploits the natural structure of the data. Our method builds upon local conformal autoencoders (LOCA) - an offline deep learning scheme for learning standardized data coordinates from measurements. Our experimental setup includes a microphone array that measures the transmitted sound source at multiple locations across the acoustic enclosure. We demonstrate that LOCA learns a representation that is isometric to the spatial locations of the microphones. The performance of our method is evaluated using a series of realistic simulations and compared with other dimensionality-reduction schemes. We further assess the influence of reverberation on the results of LOCA and show that it demonstrates considerable robustness.  ( 2 min )

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.  ( 2 min )

Extracting complex structures from grid-based data is a common key step in automated medical image analysis. The conventional solution to recovering tree-structured geometries typically involves computing the minimal cost path through intermediate representations derived from segmentation masks. However, this methodology has significant limitations in the context of projective imaging of tree-structured 3D anatomical data such as coronary arteries, since there are often overlapping branches in the 2D projection. In this work, we propose a novel approach to predicting tree connectivity structure which reformulates the task as an optimization problem over individual steps of a recursive process. We design and train a two-stage model which leverages the UNet and Transformer architectures and introduces an image-based prompting technique. Our proposed method achieves compelling results on a pair of synthetic datasets, and outperforms a shortest-path baseline.  ( 2 min )

With the rapid deployment of graph neural networks (GNNs) based techniques into a wide range of applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph classification the explainability of GNNs has become an indispensable component for predictive and trustworthy decision-making. Thus, it is critical to explain why graph neural network (GNN) makes particular predictions for them to be believed in many applications. Some GNNs explainers have been proposed recently. However, they lack to generate accurate and real explanations. To mitigate these limitations, we propose GANExplainer, based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture. GANExplainer is composed of a generator to create explanations and a discriminator to assist with the Generator development. We investigate the explanation accuracy of our models by comparing the performance of GANExplainer with other state-of-the-art methods. Our empirical results on synthetic datasets indicate that GANExplainer improves explanation accuracy by up to 35\% compared to its alternatives.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning has been widely used for protein engineering. However, it is limited by the lack of sufficient experimental data to train an accurate model for predicting the functional fitness of high-order mutants. Here, we develop SESNet, a supervised deep-learning model to predict the fitness for protein mutants by leveraging both sequence and structure information, and exploiting attention mechanism. Our model integrates local evolutionary context from homologous sequences, the global evolutionary context encoding rich semantic from the universal protein sequence space and the structure information accounting for the microenvironment around each residue in a protein. We show that SESNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for predicting the sequence-function relationship on 26 deep mutational scanning datasets. More importantly, we propose a data augmentation strategy by leveraging the data from unsupervised models to pre-train our model. After that, our model can achieve strikingly high accuracy in prediction of the fitness of protein mutants, especially for the higher order variants (> 4 mutation sites), when finetuned by using only a small number of experimental mutation data (<50). The strategy proposed is of great practical value as the required experimental effort, i.e., producing a few tens of experimental mutation data on a given protein, is generally affordable by an ordinary biochemical group and can be applied on almost any protein.  ( 2 min )

Domain adaptation methods reduce domain shift typically by learning domain-invariant features. Most existing methods are built on distribution matching, e.g., adversarial domain adaptation, which tends to corrupt feature discriminability. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Radial Domain Adaptation (DRDR) which bridges source and target domains via a shared radial structure. It's motivated by the observation that as the model is trained to be progressively discriminative, features of different categories expand outwards in different directions, forming a radial structure. We show that transferring such an inherently discriminative structure would enable to enhance feature transferability and discriminability simultaneously. Specifically, we represent each domain with a global anchor and each category a local anchor to form a radial structure and reduce domain shift via structure matching. It consists of two parts, namely isometric transformation to align the structure globally and local refinement to match each category. To enhance the discriminability of the structure, we further encourage samples to cluster close to the corresponding local anchors based on optimal-transport assignment. Extensively experimenting on multiple benchmarks, our method is shown to consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on varied tasks, including the typical unsupervised domain adaptation, multi-source domain adaptation, domain-agnostic learning, and domain generalization.  ( 2 min )

Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs) have been broadly applied in various real-life applications, such as link prediction and pandemic forecast, to capture both static structural information and temporal characteristics from dynamic graphs. Combining both time-dependent and -independent components, DGNNs manifest substantial parallel computation and data reuse potentials, but suffer from severe memory access inefficiency and data transfer overhead under the canonical one-graph-at-a-time training pattern. To tackle the challenges, we propose PiPAD, a $\underline{\textbf{Pi}}pelined$ and $\underline{\textbf{PA}}rallel$ $\underline{\textbf{D}}GNN$ training framework for the end-to-end performance optimization on GPUs. From both the algorithm and runtime level, PiPAD holistically reconstructs the overall training paradigm from the data organization to computation manner. Capable of processing multiple graph snapshots in parallel, PiPAD eliminates the unnecessary data transmission and alleviates memory access inefficiency to improve the overall performance. Our evaluation across various datasets shows PiPAD achieves $1.22\times$-$9.57\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art DGNN frameworks on three representative models.  ( 2 min )

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective platform to label a large volume of data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. Most previous works have focused on designing an efficient algorithm to recover only the ground-truth labels of the data. In this paper, we consider multi-choice crowdsourced labeling with the goal of recovering not only the ground truth but also the most confusing answer and the confusion probability. The most confusing answer provides useful information about the task by revealing the most plausible answer other than the ground truth and how plausible it is. To theoretically analyze such scenarios, we propose a model where there are top-two plausible answers for each task, distinguished from the rest of choices. Task difficulty is quantified by the confusion probability between the top two, and worker reliability is quantified by the probability of giving an answer among the top two. Under this model, we propose a two-stage inference algorithm to infer the top-two answers as well as the confusion probability. We show that our algorithm achieves the minimax optimal convergence rate. We conduct both synthetic and real-data experiments and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other recent algorithms. We also show the applicability of our algorithms in inferring the difficulty of tasks and training neural networks with the soft labels composed of the top-two most plausible classes.  ( 2 min )

Despite some successful applications of goal-driven navigation, existing deep reinforcement learning-based approaches notoriously suffers from poor data efficiency issue. One of the reasons is that the goal information is decoupled from the perception module and directly introduced as a condition of decision-making, resulting in the goal-irrelevant features of the scene representation playing an adversary role during the learning process. In light of this, we present a novel Goal-guided Transformer-enabled reinforcement learning (GTRL) approach by considering the physical goal states as an input of the scene encoder for guiding the scene representation to couple with the goal information and realizing efficient autonomous navigation. More specifically, we propose a novel variant of the Vision Transformer as the backbone of the perception system, namely Goal-guided Transformer (GoT), and pre-train it with expert priors to boost the data efficiency. Subsequently, a reinforcement learning algorithm is instantiated for the decision-making system, taking the goal-oriented scene representation from the GoT as the input and generating decision commands. As a result, our approach motivates the scene representation to concentrate mainly on goal-relevant features, which substantially enhances the data efficiency of the DRL learning process, leading to superior navigation performance. Both simulation and real-world experimental results manifest the superiority of our approach in terms of data efficiency, performance, robustness, and sim-to-real generalization, compared with other state-of-art baselines. Demonstration videos are available at \colorb{https://youtu.be/93LGlGvaN0c.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we reduce the complexity of approximating the correlation clustering problem from $O(m\times\left( 2+ \alpha (G) \right)+n)$ to $O(m+n)$ for any given value of $\varepsilon$ for a complete signed graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ positive edges where $\alpha(G)$ is the arboricity of the graph. Our approach gives the same output as the original algorithm and makes it possible to implement the algorithm in a full dynamic setting where edge sign flipping and vertex addition/removal are allowed. Constructing this index costs $O(m)$ memory and $O(m\times\alpha(G))$ time. We also studied the structural properties of the non-agreement measure used in the approximation algorithm. The theoretical results are accompanied by a full set of experiments concerning seven real-world graphs. These results shows superiority of our index-based algorithm to the non-index one by a decrease of %34 in time on average.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a practical global optimization algorithm for the K-center clustering problem, which aims to select K samples as the cluster centers to minimize the maximum within-cluster distance. This algorithm is based on a reduced-space branch and bound scheme and guarantees convergence to the global optimum in a finite number of steps by only branching on the regions of centers. To improve efficiency, we have designed a two-stage decomposable lower bound, the solution of which can be derived in a closed form. In addition, we also propose several acceleration techniques to narrow down the region of centers, including bounds tightening, sample reduction, and parallelization. Extensive studies on synthetic and real-world datasets have demonstrated that our algorithm can solve the K-center problems to global optimal within 4 hours for ten million samples in the serial mode and one billion samples in the parallel mode. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art heuristic methods, the global optimum obtained by our algorithm can averagely reduce the objective function by 25.8% on all the synthetic and real-world datasets.  ( 2 min )

An unbiased scene graph generation (SGG) algorithm referred to as Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) is proposed for considering the unbiased predicate prediction caused by the long-tailed distribution. The prior works focus mainly on alleviating the deteriorating performances of the minority predicate predictions, showing drastic dropping recall scores, i.e., losing the majority predicate performances. It has not yet correctly analyzed the trade-off between majority and minority predicate performances in the limited SGG datasets. In this paper, to alleviate the issue, the Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) loss function is considered for the unbiased SGG models. Leveraged by the skewness of biased predicate predictions, the SCR estimates the target predicate weight coefficient and then re-weights more to the biased predicates for better trading-off between the majority predicates and the minority ones. Extensive experiments conducted on the standard Visual Genome dataset and Open Image V4 \& V6 show the performances and generality of the SCR with the traditional SGG models.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net based discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel as well as global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.  ( 2 min )

It has been observed in practice that applying pruning-at-initialization methods to neural networks and training the sparsified networks can not only retain the testing performance of the original dense models, but also sometimes even slightly boost the generalization performance. Theoretical understanding for such experimental observations are yet to be developed. This work makes the first attempt to study how different pruning fractions affect the model's gradient descent dynamics and generalization. Specifically, this work considers a classification task for overparameterized two-layer neural networks, where the network is randomly pruned according to different rates at the initialization. It is shown that as long as the pruning fraction is below a certain threshold, gradient descent can drive the training loss toward zero and the network exhibits good generalization performance. More surprisingly, the generalization bound gets better as the pruning fraction gets larger. To complement this positive result, this work further shows a negative result: there exists a large pruning fraction such that while gradient descent is still able to drive the training loss toward zero (by memorizing noise), the generalization performance is no better than random guessing. This further suggests that pruning can change the feature learning process, which leads to the performance drop of the pruned neural network. Up to our knowledge, this is the \textbf{first} generalization result for pruned neural networks, suggesting that pruning can improve the neural network's generalization.  ( 2 min )

We develop theory and methods that use the graph Laplacian to analyze the geometry of the underlying manifold of point clouds. Our theory provides theoretical guarantees and explicit bounds on the functional form of the graph Laplacian, in the case when it acts on functions defined close to singularities of the underlying manifold. We also propose methods that can be used to estimate these geometric properties of the point cloud, which are based on the theoretical guarantees.  ( 2 min )

The rise in data has led to the need for dimension reduction techniques, especially in the area of non-scalar variables, including time series, natural language processing, and computer vision. In this paper, we specifically investigate dimension reduction for time series through functional data analysis. Current methods for dimension reduction in functional data are functional principal component analysis and functional autoencoders, which are limited to linear mappings or scalar representations for the time series, which is inefficient. In real data applications, the nature of the data is much more complex. We propose a non-linear function-on-function approach, which consists of a functional encoder and a functional decoder, that uses continuous hidden layers consisting of continuous neurons to learn the structure inherent in functional data, which addresses the aforementioned concerns in the existing approaches. Our approach gives a low dimension latent representation by reducing the number of functional features as well as the timepoints at which the functions are observed. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through multiple simulations and real data examples.  ( 2 min )

The ''Propose-Test-Release'' (PTR) framework is a classic recipe for designing differentially private (DP) algorithms that are data-adaptive, i.e. those that add less noise when the input dataset is nice. We extend PTR to a more general setting by privately testing data-dependent privacy losses rather than local sensitivity, hence making it applicable beyond the standard noise-adding mechanisms, e.g. to queries with unbounded or undefined sensitivity. We demonstrate the versatility of generalized PTR using private linear regression as a case study. Additionally, we apply our algorithm to solve an open problem from ''Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE)'' -- privately releasing the entire model with a delicate data-dependent analysis.  ( 2 min )

This work studies training one-hidden-layer overparameterized ReLU networks via gradient descent in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime, where, differently from the previous works, the networks' biases are trainable and are initialized to some constant rather than zero. The first set of results of this work characterize the convergence of the network's gradient descent dynamics. Surprisingly, it is shown that the network after sparsification can achieve as fast convergence as the original network. The contribution over previous work is that not only the bias is allowed to be updated by gradient descent under our setting but also a finer analysis is given such that the required width to ensure the network's closeness to its NTK is improved. Secondly, the networks' generalization bound after training is provided. A width-sparsity dependence is presented which yields sparsity-dependent localized Rademacher complexity and a generalization bound matching previous analysis (up to logarithmic factors). As a by-product, if the bias initialization is chosen to be zero, the width requirement improves the previous bound for the shallow networks' generalization. Lastly, since the generalization bound has dependence on the smallest eigenvalue of the limiting NTK and the bounds from previous works yield vacuous generalization, this work further studies the least eigenvalue of the limiting NTK. Surprisingly, while it is not shown that trainable biases are necessary, trainable bias helps to identify a nice data-dependent region where a much finer analysis of the NTK's smallest eigenvalue can be conducted, which leads to a much sharper lower bound than the previously known worst-case bound and, consequently, a non-vacuous generalization bound.  ( 2 min )

We derive a set of causal deep neural networks whose architectures are a consequence of tensor (multilinear) factor analysis. Forward causal questions are addressed with a neural network architecture composed of causal capsules and a tensor transformer. The former estimate a set of latent variables that represent the causal factors, and the latter governs their interaction. Causal capsules and tensor transformers may be implemented using shallow autoencoders, but for a scalable architecture we employ block algebra and derive a deep neural network composed of a hierarchy of autoencoders. An interleaved kernel hierarchy preprocesses the data resulting in a hierarchy of kernel tensor factor models. Inverse causal questions are addressed with a neural network that implements multilinear projection and estimates the causes of effects. As an alternative to aggressive bottleneck dimension reduction or regularized regression that may camouflage an inherently underdetermined inverse problem, we prescribe modeling different aspects of the mechanism of data formation with piecewise tensor models whose multilinear projections are well-defined and produce multiple candidate solutions. Our forward and inverse neural network architectures are suitable for asynchronous parallel computation.  ( 2 min )

Tobacco origin identification is significantly important in tobacco industry. Modeling analysis for sensor data with near infrared spectroscopy has become a popular method for rapid detection of internal features. However, for sensor data analysis using traditional artificial neural network or deep network models, the training process is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, a novel broad learning system with Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy subsystem is proposed for rapid identification of tobacco origin. Incremental learning is employed in the proposed method, which obtains the weight matrix of the network after a very small amount of computation, resulting in much shorter training time for the model, with only about 3 seconds for the extra step training. The experimental results show that the TS fuzzy subsystem can extract features from the near infrared data and effectively improve the recognition performance. The proposed method can achieve the highest prediction accuracy (95.59 %) in comparison to the traditional classification algorithms, artificial neural network, and deep convolutional neural network, and has a great advantage in the training time with only about 128 seconds.  ( 2 min )

The usage of technologically advanced devices has seen a boom in many domains, including education, automation, and healthcare; with most of the services requiring Internet connectivity. To secure a network, device identification plays key role. In this paper, a device fingerprinting (DFP) model, which is able to distinguish between Internet of Things (IoT) and non-IoT devices, as well as uniquely identify individual devices, has been proposed. Four statistical features have been extracted from the consecutive five device-originated packets, to generate individual device fingerprints. The method has been evaluated using the Random Forest (RF) classifier and different datasets. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method achieves up to 99.8% accuracy in distinguishing between IoT and non-IoT devices and over 97.6% in classifying individual devices. These signify that the proposed method is useful in assisting operators in making their networks more secure and robust to security breaches and unauthorized access.  ( 2 min )

Most Graph Neural Networks follow the message-passing paradigm, assuming the observed structure depicts the ground-truth node relationships. However, this fundamental assumption cannot always be satisfied, as real-world graphs are always incomplete, noisy, or redundant. How to reveal the inherent graph structure in a unified way remains under-explored. We proposed PRI-GSL, a Graph Structure Learning framework guided by the Principle of Relevant Information, providing a simple and unified framework for identifying the self-organization and revealing the hidden structure. PRI-GSL learns a structure that contains the most relevant yet least redundant information quantified by von Neumann entropy and Quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence. PRI-GSL incorporates the evolution of quantum continuous walk with graph wavelets to encode node structural roles, showing in which way the nodes interplay and self-organize with the graph structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of PRI-GSL.  ( 2 min )

Large training data and expensive model tweaking are standard features of deep learning for images. As a result, data owners often utilize cloud resources to develop large-scale complex models, which raises privacy concerns. Existing solutions are either too expensive to be practical or do not sufficiently protect the confidentiality of data and models. In this paper, we study and compare novel \emph{image disguising} mechanisms, DisguisedNets and InstaHide, aiming to achieve a better trade-off among the level of protection for outsourced DNN model training, the expenses, and the utility of data. DisguisedNets are novel combinations of image blocktization, block-level random permutation, and two block-level secure transformations: random multidimensional projection (RMT) and AES pixel-level encryption (AES). InstaHide is an image mixup and random pixel flipping technique \cite{huang20}. We have analyzed and evaluated them under a multi-level threat model. RMT provides a better security guarantee than InstaHide, under the Level-1 adversarial knowledge with well-preserved model quality. In contrast, AES provides a security guarantee under the Level-2 adversarial knowledge, but it may affect model quality more. The unique features of image disguising also help us to protect models from model-targeted attacks. We have done an extensive experimental evaluation to understand how these methods work in different settings for different datasets.  ( 2 min )

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .  ( 2 min )

The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning techniques with neural networks have been used effectively in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to obtain solutions to nonlinear differential equations. This paper presents a physics-informed neural network (PINN) approach to solve the Blasius function. This method eliminates the process of changing the non-linear differential equation to an initial value problem. Also, it tackles the convergence issue arising in the conventional series solution. It is seen that this method produces results that are at par with the numerical and conventional methods. The solution is extended to the negative axis to show that PINNs capture the singularity of the function at $\eta=-5.69$  ( 2 min )

Despite its importance for federated learning, continuous learning and many other applications, on-device training remains an open problem for EdgeAI. The problem stems from the large number of operations (e.g., floating point multiplications and additions) and memory consumption required during training by the back-propagation algorithm. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a new gradient filtering approach which enables on-device DNN model training. More precisely, our approach creates a special structure with fewer unique elements in the gradient map, thus significantly reducing the computational complexity and memory consumption of back propagation during training. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation with multiple DNN models (e.g., MobileNet, DeepLabV3, UPerNet) and devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano) demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach. For example, compared to SOTA, we achieve up to 19$\times$ speedup and 77.1% memory savings on ImageNet classification with only 0.1% accuracy loss. Finally, our method is easy to implement and deploy; over 20$\times$ speedup and 90% energy savings have been observed compared to highly optimized baselines in MKLDNN and CUDNN on NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Consequently, our approach opens up a new direction of research with a huge potential for on-device training.  ( 2 min )

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system that connects physical computing devices, sensors, software, and other technologies. Data can be collected, transferred, and exchanged with other devices over the network without requiring human interactions. One challenge the development of IoT faces is the existence of anomaly data in the network. Therefore, research on anomaly detection in the IoT environment has become popular and necessary in recent years. This survey provides an overview to understand the current progress of the different anomaly detection algorithms and how they can be applied in the context of the Internet of Things. In this survey, we categorize the widely used anomaly detection machine learning and deep learning techniques in IoT into three types: clustering-based, classification-based, and deep learning based. For each category, we introduce some state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods and evaluate the advantages and limitations of each technique.  ( 2 min )

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most important branches of AI. Due to its capacity for self-adaption and decision-making in dynamic environments, reinforcement learning has been widely applied in multiple areas, such as healthcare, data markets, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, some of these applications and systems have been shown to be vulnerable to security or privacy attacks, resulting in unreliable or unstable services. A large number of studies have focused on these security and privacy problems in reinforcement learning. However, few surveys have provided a systematic review and comparison of existing problems and state-of-the-art solutions to keep up with the pace of emerging threats. Accordingly, we herein present such a comprehensive review to explain and summarize the challenges associated with security and privacy in reinforcement learning from a new perspective, namely that of the Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this survey, we first introduce the key concepts related to this area. Next, we cover the security and privacy issues linked to the state, action, environment, and reward function of the MDP process, respectively. We further highlight the special characteristics of security and privacy methodologies related to reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss the possible future research directions within this area.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we discuss the theory used in the design of an open source lightmorphic signatures analysis toolkit (LSAT). In addition to providing a core functionality, the software package enables specific optimizations with its modular and customizable design. To promote its usage and inspire future contributions, LSAT is publicly available. By using a self-supervised neural network and augmented machine learning algorithms, LSAT provides an easy-to-use interface with ample documentation. The experiments demonstrate that LSAT improves the otherwise tedious and error-prone tasks of translating lightmorphic associated data into usable spectrograms, enhanced with parameter tuning and performance analysis. With the provided mathematical functions, LSAT validates the nonlinearity encountered in the data conversion process while ensuring suitability of the forecasting algorithms.  ( 2 min )

We propose a new causal inference framework to learn causal effects from multiple, decentralized data sources in a federated setting. We introduce an adaptive transfer algorithm that learns the similarities among the data sources by utilizing Random Fourier Features to disentangle the loss function into multiple components, each of which is associated with a data source. The data sources may have different distributions; the causal effects are independently and systematically incorporated. The proposed method estimates the similarities among the sources through transfer coefficients, and hence requiring no prior information about the similarity measures. The heterogeneous causal effects can be estimated with no sharing of the raw training data among the sources, thus minimizing the risk of privacy leak. We also provide minimax lower bounds to assess the quality of the parameters learned from the disparate sources. The proposed method is empirically shown to outperform the baselines on decentralized data sources with dissimilar distributions.  ( 2 min )

The success of neural networks builds to a large extent on their ability to create internal knowledge representations from real-world high-dimensional data, such as images, sound, or text. Approaches to extract and present these representations, in order to explain the neural network's decisions, is an active and multifaceted research field. To gain a deeper understanding of a central aspect of this field, we have performed a targeted review focusing on research that aims to associate internal representations with human understandable concepts. In doing this, we added a perspective on the existing research by using primarily deductive nomological explanations as a proposed taxonomy. We find this taxonomy and theories of causality, useful for understanding what can be expected, and not expected, from neural network explanations. The analysis additionally uncovers an ambiguity in the reviewed literature related to the goal of model explainability; is it understanding the ML model or, is it actionable explanations useful in the deployment domain?  ( 2 min )

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.  ( 2 min )

Charisma is considered as one's ability to attract and potentially also influence others. Clearly, there can be considerable interest from an artificial intelligence's (AI) perspective to provide it with such skill. Beyond, a plethora of use cases opens up for computational measurement of human charisma, such as for tutoring humans in the acquisition of charisma, mediating human-to-human conversation, or identifying charismatic individuals in big social data. A number of models exist that base charisma on various dimensions, often following the idea that charisma is given if someone could and would help others. Examples include influence (could help) and affability (would help) in scientific studies or power (could help), presence, and warmth (both would help) as a popular concept. Modelling high levels in these dimensions for humanoid robots or virtual agents, seems accomplishable. Beyond, also automatic measurement appears quite feasible with the recent advances in the related fields of Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing. Here, we, thereforem present a blueprint for building machines that can appear charismatic, but also analyse the charisma of others. To this end, we first provide the psychological perspective including different models of charisma and behavioural cues of it. We then switch to conversational charisma in spoken language as an exemplary modality that is essential for human-human and human-computer conversations. The computational perspective then deals with the recognition and generation of charismatic behaviour by AI. This includes an overview of the state of play in the field and the aforementioned blueprint. We then name exemplary use cases of computational charismatic skills before switching to ethical aspects and concluding this overview and perspective on building charisma-enabled AI.  ( 3 min )

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has become a popular alternative to supervised imitation learning that reduces the distribution shift suffered by the latter. However, AIL requires effective exploration during an online reinforcement learning phase. In this work, we show that the standard, naive approach to exploration can manifest as a suboptimal local maximum if a policy learned with AIL sufficiently matches the expert distribution without fully learning the desired task. This can be particularly catastrophic for manipulation tasks, where the difference between an expert and a non-expert state-action pair is often subtle. We present Learning from Guided Play (LfGP), a framework in which we leverage expert demonstrations of multiple exploratory, auxiliary tasks in addition to a main task. The addition of these auxiliary tasks forces the agent to explore states and actions that standard AIL may learn to ignore. Additionally, this particular formulation allows for the reusability of expert data between main tasks. Our experimental results in a challenging multitask robotic manipulation domain indicate that LfGP significantly outperforms both AIL and behaviour cloning, while also being more expert sample efficient than these baselines. To explain this performance gap, we provide further analysis of a toy problem that highlights the coupling between a local maximum and poor exploration, and also visualize the differences between the learned models from AIL and LfGP.  ( 2 min )

The node-place model has been widely used to classify and evaluate transit stations, which sheds light on individual travel behaviors and supports urban planning through effectively integrating land use and transportation development. This article adapts this model to investigate whether and how node, place, and mobility would be associated with the transmission risks and presences of the local COVID-19 cases in a city. Similar studies on the model and its relevance to COVID-19, according to our knowledge, have not been undertaken before. Moreover, the unique metric drawn from detailed visit history of the infected, i.e., the COVID-19 footprints, is proposed and exploited. This study then empirically uses the adapted model to examine the station-level factors affecting the local COVID-19 footprints. The model accounts for traditional measures of the node and place as well as actual human mobility patterns associated with the node and place. It finds that stations with high node, place, and human mobility indices normally have more COVID-19 footprints in proximity. A multivariate regression is fitted to see whether and to what degree different indices and indicators can predict the COVID-19 footprints. The results indicate that many of the place, node, and human mobility indicators significantly impact the concentration of COVID-19 footprints. These are useful for policy-makers to predict and monitor hotspots for COVID-19 and other pandemics transmission.  ( 2 min )

Multiple studies have focused on predicting the prospective popularity of an online document as a whole, without paying attention to the contributions of its individual parts. We introduce the task of proactively forecasting popularities of sentences within online news documents solely utilizing their natural language content. We model sentence-specific popularity forecasting as a sequence regression task. For training our models, we curate InfoPop, the first dataset containing popularity labels for over 1.7 million sentences from over 50,000 online news documents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset automatically created using streams of incoming search engine queries to generate sentence-level popularity annotations. We propose a novel transfer learning approach involving sentence salience prediction as an auxiliary task. Our proposed technique coupled with a BERT-based neural model exceeds nDCG values of 0.8 for proactive sentence-specific popularity forecasting. Notably, our study presents a non-trivial takeaway: though popularity and salience are different concepts, transfer learning from salience prediction enhances popularity forecasting. We release InfoPop and make our code publicly available: https://github.com/sayarghoshroy/InfoPopularity  ( 2 min )

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure  ( 2 min )

Biological systems often choose actions without an explicit reward signal, a phenomenon known as intrinsic motivation. The computational principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigate an information-theoretic approach to intrinsic motivation, based on maximizing an agent's empowerment (the mutual information between its past actions and future states). We show that this approach generalizes previous attempts to formalize intrinsic motivation, and we provide a computationally efficient algorithm for computing the necessary quantities. We test our approach on several benchmark control problems, and we explain its success in guiding intrinsically motivated behaviors by relating our information-theoretic control function to fundamental properties of the dynamical system representing the combined agent-environment system. This opens the door for designing practical artificial, intrinsically motivated controllers and for linking animal behaviors to their dynamical properties.  ( 2 min )

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) shows how it maintains certain significant advantages over machine learning methods. It now shows that hybrid quantum methods have great scope for deployment and optimisation, and hold promise for future industries. As a weakness, quantum computing does not have enough qubits to justify its potential. This topic of study gives us encouraging results in the improvement of quantum coding, being the data preprocessing an important point in this research we employ two dimensionality reduction techniques LDA and PCA applying them in a hybrid way Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC) and Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) in the classification of Diabetes.  ( 2 min )

The traditional statistical inference is static, in the sense that the estimate of the quantity of interest does not affect the future evolution of the quantity. In some sequential estimation problems however, the future values of the quantity to be estimated depend on the estimate of its current value. This type of estimation problems has been formulated as the dynamic inference problem. In this work, we formulate the Bayesian learning problem for dynamic inference, where the unknown quantity-generation model is assumed to be randomly drawn according to a random model parameter. We derive the optimal Bayesian learning rules, both offline and online, to minimize the inference loss. Moreover, learning for dynamic inference can serve as a meta problem, such that all familiar machine learning problems, including supervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning, can be cast as its special cases or variants. Gaining a good understanding of this unifying meta problem thus sheds light on a broad spectrum of machine learning problems as well.  ( 2 min )

Advances in reinforcement learning have led to its successful application in complex tasks with continuous state and action spaces. Despite these advances in practice, most theoretical work pertains to finite state and action spaces. We propose building a theoretical understanding of continuous state and action spaces by employing a geometric lens. Central to our work is the idea that the transition dynamics induce a low dimensional manifold of reachable states embedded in the high-dimensional nominal state space. We prove that, under certain conditions, the dimensionality of this manifold is at most the dimensionality of the action space plus one. This is the first result of its kind, linking the geometry of the state space to the dimensionality of the action space. We empirically corroborate this upper bound for four MuJoCo environments. We further demonstrate the applicability of our result by learning a policy in this low dimensional representation. To do so we introduce an algorithm that learns a mapping to a low dimensional representation, as a narrow hidden layer of a deep neural network, in tandem with the policy using DDPG. Our experiments show that a policy learnt this way perform on par or better for four MuJoCo control suite tasks.  ( 2 min )

We study estimation and testing in the Poisson regression model with noisy high dimensional covariates, which has wide applications in analyzing noisy big data. Correcting for the estimation bias due to the covariate noise leads to a non-convex target function to minimize. Treating the high dimensional issue further leads us to augment an amenable penalty term to the target function. We propose to estimate the regression parameter through minimizing the penalized target function. We derive the L1 and L2 convergence rates of the estimator and prove the variable selection consistency. We further establish the asymptotic normality of any subset of the parameters, where the subset can have infinitely many components as long as its cardinality grows sufficiently slow. We develop Wald and score tests based on the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which permits testing of linear functions of the members if the subset. We examine the finite sample performance of the proposed tests by extensive simulation. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, which motivated this work initially.  ( 2 min )

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side information is available, e.g., patients' records or customers' history, which allows for personalized treatment. We focus on consistency -- vanishing regret compared to the optimal policy -- and show that for large classes of non-i.i.d. contexts, consistency can be achieved regardless of the time-invariant reward mechanism, a property known as universal consistency. Precisely, we first give necessary and sufficient conditions on the context-generating process for universal consistency to be possible. Second, we show that there always exists an algorithm that guarantees universal consistency whenever this is achievable, called an optimistically universal learning rule. Interestingly, for finite action spaces, learnable processes for universal learning are exactly the same as in the full-feedback setting of supervised learning, previously studied in the literature. In other words, learning can be performed with partial feedback without any generalization cost. The algorithms balance a trade-off between generalization (similar to structural risk minimization) and personalization (tailoring actions to specific contexts). Lastly, we consider the case of added continuity assumptions on rewards and show that these lead to universal consistency for significantly larger classes of data-generating processes.  ( 2 min )

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) via deep learning has attracted appealing attention for tackling domain-shift problems caused by distribution discrepancy across different domains. Existing UDA approaches highly depend on the accessibility of source domain data, which is usually limited in practical scenarios due to privacy protection, data storage and transmission cost, and computation burden. To tackle this issue, many source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) methods have been proposed recently, which perform knowledge transfer from a pre-trained source model to unlabeled target domain with source data inaccessible. A comprehensive review of these works on SFUDA is of great significance. In this paper, we provide a timely and systematic literature review of existing SFUDA approaches from a technical perspective. Specifically, we categorize current SFUDA studies into two groups, i.e., white-box SFUDA and black-box SFUDA, and further divide them into finer subcategories based on different learning strategies they use. We also investigate the challenges of methods in each subcategory, discuss the advantages/disadvantages of white-box and black-box SFUDA methods, conclude the commonly used benchmark datasets, and summarize the popular techniques for improved generalizability of models learned without using source data. We finally discuss several promising future directions in this field.  ( 2 min )

This work addresses an alternative approach for query expansion (QE) using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the effectiveness of information search in e-commerce. We propose a modified QE conditional GAN (mQE-CGAN) framework, which resolves keywords by expanding the query with a synthetically generated query that proposes semantic information from text input. We train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model as the generator to produce keywords and use a recurrent neural network model as the discriminator to classify an adversarial output with the generator. With the modified CGAN framework, various forms of semantic insights gathered from the query document corpus are introduced to the generation process. We leverage these insights as conditions for the generator model and discuss their effectiveness for the query expansion task. Our experiments demonstrate that the utilization of condition structures within the mQE-CGAN framework can increase the semantic similarity between generated sequences and reference documents up to nearly 10% compared to baseline models  ( 2 min )

An Anomaly Detection (AD) System for Self-diagnosis has been developed for Multiphase Flow Meter (MPFM). The system relies on machine learning algorithms for time series forecasting, historical data have been used to train a model and to predict the behavior of a sensor and, thus, to detect anomalies.  ( 2 min )

Almost 80 million Americans suffer from hair loss due to aging, stress, medication, or genetic makeup. Hair and scalp-related diseases often go unnoticed in the beginning. Sometimes, a patient cannot differentiate between hair loss and regular hair fall. Diagnosing hair-related diseases is time-consuming as it requires professional dermatologists to perform visual and medical tests. Because of that, the overall diagnosis gets delayed, which worsens the severity of the illness. Due to the image-processing ability, neural network-based applications are used in various sectors, especially healthcare and health informatics, to predict deadly diseases like cancers and tumors. These applications assist clinicians and patients and provide an initial insight into early-stage symptoms. In this study, we used a deep learning approach that successfully predicts three main types of hair loss and scalp-related diseases: alopecia, psoriasis, and folliculitis. However, limited study in this area, unavailability of a proper dataset, and degree of variety among the images scattered over the internet made the task challenging. 150 images were obtained from various sources and then preprocessed by denoising, image equalization, enhancement, and data balancing, thereby minimizing the error rate. After feeding the processed data into the 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) model, we obtained overall training accuracy of 96.2%, with a validation accuracy of 91.1%. The precision and recall score of alopecia, psoriasis, and folliculitis are 0.895, 0.846, and 1.0, respectively. We also created a dataset of the scalp images for future prospective researchers.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural networks can approximate functions on different types of data, from images to graphs, with varied underlying structure. This underlying structure can be viewed as the geometry of the data manifold. By extending recent advances in the theoretical understanding of neural networks, we study how a randomly initialized neural network with piece-wise linear activation splits the data manifold into regions where the neural network behaves as a linear function. We derive bounds on the density of boundary of linear regions and the distance to these boundaries on the data manifold. This leads to insights into the expressivity of randomly initialized deep neural networks on non-Euclidean data sets. We empirically corroborate our theoretical results using a toy supervised learning problem. Our experiments demonstrate that number of linear regions varies across manifolds and the results hold with changing neural network architectures. We further demonstrate how the complexity of linear regions is different on the low dimensional manifold of images as compared to the Euclidean space, using the MetFaces dataset.  ( 2 min )

Collaboration among industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge networks is essential to support computation-intensive deep neural network (DNN) inference services which require low delay and high accuracy. Sampling rate adaption which dynamically configures the sampling rates of industrial IoT devices according to network conditions, is the key in minimizing the service delay. In this paper, we investigate the collaborative DNN inference problem in industrial IoT networks. To capture the channel variation and task arrival randomness, we formulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Specifically, sampling rate adaption, inference task offloading and edge computing resource allocation are jointly considered to minimize the average service delay while guaranteeing the long-term accuracy requirements of different inference services. Since CMDP cannot be directly solved by general reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms due to the intractable long-term constraints, we first transform the CMDP into an MDP by leveraging the Lyapunov optimization technique. Then, a deep RL-based algorithm is proposed to solve the MDP. To expedite the training process, an optimization subroutine is embedded in the proposed algorithm to directly obtain the optimal edge computing resource allocation. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RL-based algorithm can significantly reduce the average service delay while preserving long-term inference accuracy with a high probability.  ( 2 min )

The surrogate loss of variational autoencoders (VAEs) poses various challenges to their training, inducing the imbalance between task fitting and representation inference. To avert this, the existing strategies for VAEs focus on adjusting the tradeoff by introducing hyperparameters, deriving a tighter bound under some mild assumptions, or decomposing the loss components per certain neural settings. VAEs still suffer from uncertain tradeoff learning.We propose a novel evolutionary variational autoencoder (eVAE) building on the variational information bottleneck (VIB) theory and integrative evolutionary neural learning. eVAE integrates a variational genetic algorithm into VAE with variational evolutionary operators including variational mutation, crossover, and evolution. Its inner-outer-joint training mechanism synergistically and dynamically generates and updates the uncertain tradeoff learning in the evidence lower bound (ELBO) without additional constraints. Apart from learning a lossy compression and representation of data under the VIB assumption, eVAE presents an evolutionary paradigm to tune critical factors of VAEs and deep neural networks and addresses the premature convergence and random search problem by integrating evolutionary optimization into deep learning. Experiments show that eVAE addresses the KL-vanishing problem for text generation with low reconstruction loss, generates all disentangled factors with sharp images, and improves the image generation quality,respectively. eVAE achieves better reconstruction loss, disentanglement, and generation-inference balance than its competitors.  ( 2 min )

According to the latest trend of artificial intelligence, AI-systems needs to clarify regarding general,specific decisions,services provided by it. Only consumer is satisfied, with explanation , for example, why any classification result is the outcome of any given time. This actually motivates us using explainable or human understandable AI for a behavioral mining scenario, where users engagement on digital platform is determined from context, such as emotion, activity, weather, etc. However, the output of AI-system is not always systematically correct, and often systematically correct, but apparently not-perfect and thereby creating confusions, such as, why the decision is given? What is the reason underneath? In this context, we first formulate the behavioral mining problem in deep convolutional neural network architecture. Eventually, we apply a recursive neural network due to the presence of time-series data from users physiological and environmental sensor-readings. Once the model is developed, explanations are presented with the advent of XAI models in front of users. This critical step involves extensive trial with users preference on explanations over conventional AI, judgement of credibility of explanation.  ( 2 min )

This short report reviews the current state of the research and methodology on theoretical and practical aspects of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). It was prepared to gather state-of-the-art knowledge needed to construct complex, hypercomplex and fuzzy neural networks. The report reflects the individual interests of the authors and, by now means, cannot be treated as a comprehensive review of the ANN discipline. Considering the fast development of this field, it is currently impossible to do a detailed review of a considerable number of pages. The report is an outcome of the Project 'The Strategic Research Partnership for the mathematical aspects of complex, hypercomplex and fuzzy neural networks' meeting at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland, organized in September 2022.  ( 2 min )

Sparse regression has been a popular approach to perform variable selection and enhance the prediction accuracy and interpretability of the resulting statistical model. Existing approaches focus on offline regularized regression, while the online scenario has rarely been studied. In this paper, we propose a novel online sparse linear regression framework for analyzing streaming data when data points arrive sequentially. Our proposed method is memory efficient and requires less stringent restricted strong convexity assumptions. Theoretically, we show that with a properly chosen regularization parameter, the $\ell_2$-norm statistical error of our estimator diminishes to zero in the optimal order of $\tilde{O}({\sqrt{s/t}})$, where $s$ is the sparsity level, $t$ is the streaming sample size, and $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ hides logarithmic terms. Numerical experiments demonstrate the practical efficiency of our algorithm.  ( 2 min )

Single-cell transcriptomics enabled the study of cellular heterogeneity in response to perturbations at the resolution of individual cells. However, scaling high-throughput screens (HTSs) to measure cellular responses for many drugs remains a challenge due to technical limitations and, more importantly, the cost of such multiplexed experiments. Thus, transferring information from routinely performed bulk RNA HTS is required to enrich single-cell data meaningfully. We introduce chemCPA, a new encoder-decoder architecture to study the perturbational effects of unseen drugs. We combine the model with an architecture surgery for transfer learning and demonstrate how training on existing bulk RNA HTS datasets can improve generalisation performance. Better generalisation reduces the need for extensive and costly screens at single-cell resolution. We envision that our proposed method will facilitate more efficient experiment designs through its ability to generate in-silico hypotheses, ultimately accelerating drug discovery.  ( 2 min )

In this paper we establish a mathematically rigorous connection between Causal inference (C-inf) and the low-rank recovery (LRR). Using Random Duality Theory (RDT) concepts developed in [46,48,50] and novel mathematical strategies related to free probability theory, we obtain the exact explicit typical (and achievable) worst case phase transitions (PT). These PT precisely separate scenarios where causal inference via LRR is possible from those where it is not. We supplement our mathematical analysis with numerical experiments that confirm the theoretical predictions of PT phenomena, and further show that the two closely match for fairly small sample sizes. We obtain simple closed form representations for the resulting PTs, which highlight direct relations between the low rankness of the target C-inf matrix and the time of the treatment. Hence, our results can be used to determine the range of C-inf's typical applicability.  ( 2 min )

Units equivariance (or units covariance) is the exact symmetry that follows from the requirement that relationships among measured quantities of physics relevance must obey self-consistent dimensional scalings. Here, we express this symmetry in terms of a (non-compact) group action, and we employ dimensional analysis and ideas from equivariant machine learning to provide a methodology for exactly units-equivariant machine learning: For any given learning task, we first construct a dimensionless version of its inputs using classic results from dimensional analysis, and then perform inference in the dimensionless space. Our approach can be used to impose units equivariance across a broad range of machine learning methods which are equivariant to rotations and other groups. We discuss the in-sample and out-of-sample prediction accuracy gains one can obtain in contexts like symbolic regression and emulation, where symmetry is important. We illustrate our approach with simple numerical examples involving dynamical systems in physics and ecology.  ( 2 min )

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.  ( 2 min )

Preface to the special issue "Characterisation of Physical Processes from Anomalous Diffusion Data" associated with the Anomalous Diffusion Challenge ( https://andi-challenge.org ) and published in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical. The list of articles included in the special issue can be accessed at https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1751-8121/page/Characterisation-of-Physical-Processes-from-Anomalous-Diffusion-Data .  ( 2 min )

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a flexible representation for real-world decision and control problems. However, POMDPs are notoriously difficult to solve, especially when the state and observation spaces are continuous or hybrid, which is often the case for physical systems. While recent online sampling-based POMDP algorithms that plan with observation likelihood weighting have shown practical effectiveness, a general theory characterizing the approximation error of the particle filtering techniques that these algorithms use has not previously been proposed. Our main contribution is bounding the error between any POMDP and its corresponding finite sample particle belief MDP (PB-MDP) approximation. This fundamental bridge between PB-MDPs and POMDPs allows us to adapt any sampling-based MDP algorithm to a POMDP by solving the corresponding particle belief MDP, thereby extending the convergence guarantees of the MDP algorithm to the POMDP. Practically, this is implemented by using the particle filter belief transition model as the generative model for the MDP solver. While this requires access to the observation density model from the POMDP, it only increases the transition sampling complexity of the MDP solver by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(C)$, where $C$ is the number of particles. Thus, when combined with sparse sampling MDP algorithms, this approach can yield algorithms for POMDPs that have no direct theoretical dependence on the size of the state and observation spaces. In addition to our theoretical contribution, we perform five numerical experiments on benchmark POMDPs to demonstrate that a simple MDP algorithm adapted using PB-MDP approximation, Sparse-PFT, achieves performance competitive with other leading continuous observation POMDP solvers.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we study the design and analysis of experiments conducted on a set of units over multiple time periods where the starting time of the treatment may vary by unit. The design problem involves selecting an initial treatment time for each unit in order to most precisely estimate both the instantaneous and cumulative effects of the treatment. We first consider non-adaptive experiments, where all treatment assignment decisions are made prior to the start of the experiment. For this case, we show that the optimization problem is generally NP-hard and we propose a near-optimal solution. Under this solution the fraction entering treatment each period is initially low, then high, and finally low again. Next, we study an adaptive experimental design problem, where both the decision to continue the experiment and treatment assignment decisions are updated after each period's data is collected. For the adaptive case we propose a new algorithm, the Precision-Guided Adaptive Experiment (PGAE) algorithm, that addresses the challenges at both the design stage and at the stage of estimating treatment effects, ensuring valid post-experiment inference accounting for the adaptive nature of the design. Using realistic settings, we demonstrate that our proposed solutions can reduce the opportunity cost of the experiments by over 50\%, compared to static design benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

Projection robust Wasserstein (PRW) distance, or Wasserstein projection pursuit (WPP), is a robust variant of the Wasserstein distance. Recent work suggests that this quantity is more robust than the standard Wasserstein distance, in particular when comparing probability measures in high-dimensions. However, it is ruled out for practical application because the optimization model is essentially non-convex and non-smooth which makes the computation intractable. Our contribution in this paper is to revisit the original motivation behind WPP/PRW, but take the hard route of showing that, despite its non-convexity and lack of nonsmoothness, and even despite some hardness results proved by~\citet{Niles-2019-Estimation} in a minimax sense, the original formulation for PRW/WPP \textit{can} be efficiently computed in practice using Riemannian optimization, yielding in relevant cases better behavior than its convex relaxation. More specifically, we provide three simple algorithms with solid theoretical guarantee on their complexity bound (one in the appendix), and demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency by conducing extensive experiments on synthetic and real data. This paper provides a first step into a computational theory of the PRW distance and provides the links between optimal transport and Riemannian optimization.  ( 3 min )

Bayesian networks are widely used to learn and reason about the dependence structure of discrete variables. However, they are only capable of formally encoding symmetric conditional independence, which in practice is often too strict to hold. Asymmetry-labeled DAGs have been recently proposed to both extend the class of Bayesian networks by relaxing the symmetric assumption of independence and denote the type of dependence existing between the variables of interest. Here, we introduce novel structural learning algorithms for this class of models which, whilst being efficient, allow for a straightforward interpretation of the underlying dependence structure. A comprehensive computational study highlights the efficiency of the algorithms. A real-world data application using data from the Fear of COVID-19 Scale collected in Italy showcases their use in practice.  ( 2 min )

We propose Distribution Embedding Networks (DEN) for classification with small data. In the same spirit of meta-learning, DEN learns from a diverse set of training tasks with the goal to generalize to unseen target tasks. Unlike existing approaches which require the inputs of training and target tasks to have the same dimension with possibly similar distributions, DEN allows training and target tasks to live in heterogeneous input spaces. This is especially useful for tabular-data tasks where labeled data from related tasks are scarce. DEN uses a three-block architecture: a covariate transformation block followed by a distribution embedding block and then a classification block. We provide theoretical insights to show that this architecture allows the embedding and classification blocks to be fixed after pre-training on a diverse set of tasks; only the covariate transformation block with relatively few parameters needs to be fine-tuned for each new task. To facilitate training, we also propose an approach to synthesize binary classification tasks, and demonstrate that DEN outperforms existing methods in a number of synthetic and real tasks in numerical studies.  ( 2 min )

Data-driven neighborhood definitions and graph constructions are often used in machine learning and signal processing applications. k-nearest neighbor~(kNN) and $\epsilon$-neighborhood methods are among the most common methods used for neighborhood selection, due to their computational simplicity. However, the choice of parameters associated with these methods, such as k and $\epsilon$, is still ad hoc. We make two main contributions in this paper. First, we present an alternative view of neighborhood selection, where we show that neighborhood construction is equivalent to a sparse signal approximation problem. Second, we propose an algorithm, non-negative kernel regression~(NNK), for obtaining neighborhoods that lead to better sparse representation. NNK draws similarities to the orthogonal matching pursuit approach to signal representation and possesses desirable geometric and theoretical properties. Experiments demonstrate (i) the robustness of the NNK algorithm for neighborhood and graph construction, (ii) its ability to adapt the number of neighbors to the data properties, and (iii) its superior performance in local neighborhood and graph-based machine learning tasks.  ( 2 min )

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.  ( 2 min )

In this short article, we showcase the derivation of the optimal (minimum error variance) estimator, when one part of the stochastic LTI system output is not measured but is able to be predicted from the measured system outputs. Similar derivations have been done before but not using state-space representation.  ( 2 min )

A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic approximations of the objective function and its associated derivatives can be computed via inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Under reasonable assumptions, a high-probability bound on the iteration complexity of the algorithm to approximate first-order stationarity is derived. Numerical results on standard nonlinear optimization test problems illustrate the advantages and limitations of our proposed method.  ( 2 min )

Tree ensembles can be well-suited for black-box optimization tasks such as algorithm tuning and neural architecture search, as they achieve good predictive performance with little or no manual tuning, naturally handle discrete feature spaces, and are relatively insensitive to outliers in the training data. Two well-known challenges in using tree ensembles for black-box optimization are (i) effectively quantifying model uncertainty for exploration and (ii) optimizing over the piece-wise constant acquisition function. To address both points simultaneously, we propose using the kernel interpretation of tree ensembles as a Gaussian Process prior to obtain model variance estimates, and we develop a compatible optimization formulation for the acquisition function. The latter further allows us to seamlessly integrate known constraints to improve sampling efficiency by considering domain-knowledge in engineering settings and modeling search space symmetries, e.g., hierarchical relationships in neural architecture search. Our framework performs as well as state-of-the-art methods for unconstrained black-box optimization over continuous/discrete features and outperforms competing methods for problems combining mixed-variable feature spaces and known input constraints.  ( 2 min )

We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) with Sinkhorn distance -- a variant of Wasserstein distance based on entropic regularization. We provide convex programming dual reformulation for a general nominal distribution. Compared with Wasserstein DRO, it is computationally tractable for a larger class of loss functions, and its worst-case distribution is more reasonable. We propose an efficient first-order algorithm with bisection search to solve the dual reformulation. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm finds $\delta$-optimal solution of the new DRO formulation with computation cost $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-3})$ and memory cost $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-2})$, and the computation cost further improves to $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-2})$ when the loss function is smooth. Finally, we provide various numerical examples using both synthetic and real data to demonstrate its competitive performance and light computational speed.  ( 2 min )

Influenced mixed moving average fields are a versatile modeling class for spatio-temporal data. However, their predictive distribution is not generally accessible. Under this modeling assumption, we define a novel theory-guided machine learning approach that employs a generalized Bayesian algorithm to make predictions. We employ a Lipschitz predictor, for example, a linear model or a feed-forward neural network, and determine a randomized estimator by minimizing a novel PAC Bayesian bound for data serially correlated along a spatial and temporal dimension. Performing causal future predictions is a highlight of our methodology as its potential application to data with short and long-range dependence. We conclude by showing the performance of the learning methodology in an example with linear predictors and simulated spatio-temporal data from an STOU process.  ( 2 min )

Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows logarithmically in the number of arm plays, at a rate governed by the Lai-Robbins lower bound. In this paper, we show that when one uses such optimized designs, the regret distribution of the associated algorithms necessarily has a very heavy tail, specifically, that of a truncated Cauchy distribution. Furthermore, for $p>1$, the $p$'th moment of the regret distribution grows much faster than poly-logarithmically, in particular as a power of the total number of arm plays. We show that optimized UCB bandit designs are also fragile in an additional sense, namely when the problem is even slightly mis-specified, the regret can grow much faster than the conventional theory suggests. Our arguments are based on standard change-of-measure ideas, and indicate that the most likely way that regret becomes larger than expected is when the optimal arm returns below-average rewards in the first few arm plays, thereby causing the algorithm to believe that the arm is sub-optimal. To alleviate the fragility issues exposed, we show that UCB algorithms can be modified so as to ensure a desired degree of robustness to mis-specification. In doing so, we also provide a sharp trade-off between the amount of UCB exploration and the tail exponent of the resulting regret distribution.  ( 2 min )

We consider a novel lossy compression approach based on unconditional diffusion generative models, which we call DiffC. Unlike modern compression schemes which rely on transform coding and quantization to restrict the transmitted information, DiffC relies on the efficient communication of pixels corrupted by Gaussian noise. We implement a proof of concept and find that it works surprisingly well despite the lack of an encoder transform, outperforming the state-of-the-art generative compression method HiFiC on ImageNet 64x64. DiffC only uses a single model to encode and denoise corrupted pixels at arbitrary bitrates. The approach further provides support for progressive coding, that is, decoding from partial bit streams. We perform a rate-distortion analysis to gain a deeper understanding of its performance, providing analytical results for multivariate Gaussian data as well as theoretic bounds for general distributions. Furthermore, we prove that a flow-based reconstruction achieves a 3 dB gain over ancestral sampling at high bitrates.  ( 2 min )

Consider the problem of matching two independent i.i.d. samples of size $N$ from two distributions $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. For an arbitrary continuous cost function, the optimal assignment problem looks for the matching that minimizes the total cost. We consider instead in this paper the problem where each matching is endowed with a Gibbs probability weight proportional to the exponential of the negative total cost of that matching. Viewing each matching as a joint distribution with $N$ atoms, we then take a convex combination with respect to the above Gibbs probability measure. We show that this resulting random joint distribution converges, as $N\rightarrow \infty$, to the solution of a variational problem, introduced by F\"ollmer, called the Schr\"odinger problem. We also derive the first two error terms of orders $N^{-1/2}$ and $N^{-1}$, respectively. This gives us central limit theorems for integrated test functions, including for the cost of transport, and second order Gaussian chaos limits when the limiting Gaussian variance is zero. The proofs are based on a novel chaos decomposition of the discrete Schr\"odinger bridge by polynomial functions of the pair of empirical distributions as the first and second order Taylor approximations in the space of measures. This is achieved by extending the Hoeffding decomposition from the classical theory of U-statistics.  ( 2 min )

Algorithmic fairness is becoming increasingly important in data mining and machine learning. Among others, a foundational notation is group fairness. The vast majority of the existing works on group fairness, with a few exceptions, primarily focus on debiasing with respect to a single sensitive attribute, despite the fact that the co-existence of multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, marital status, etc.) in the real-world is commonplace. As such, methods that can ensure a fair learning outcome with respect to all sensitive attributes of concern simultaneously need to be developed. In this paper, we study the problem of information-theoretic intersectional fairness (InfoFair), where statistical parity, a representative group fairness measure, is guaranteed among demographic groups formed by multiple sensitive attributes of interest. We formulate it as a mutual information minimization problem and propose a generic end-to-end algorithmic framework to solve it. The key idea is to leverage a variational representation of mutual information, which considers the variational distribution between learning outcomes and sensitive attributes, as well as the density ratio between the variational and the original distributions. Our proposed framework is generalizable to many different settings, including other statistical notions of fairness, and could handle any type of learning task equipped with a gradient-based optimizer. Empirical evaluations in the fair classification task on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively debias the classification results with minimal impact to the classification accuracy.  ( 2 min )

Modern deep neural networks have achieved superhuman performance in tasks from image classification to game play. Surprisingly, these various complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same remarkable structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets. This phenomenon is known as "Neural Collapse," and it was discovered empirically by Papyan et al. \cite{Papyan20}. Recent papers have theoretically shown the global solutions to the training network problem under a simplified "unconstrained feature model" exhibiting this phenomenon. We take a step further and prove the Neural Collapse occurrence for deep linear network for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) loss. Furthermore, we extend our research to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis for Neural Collapse under this setting.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we revisit and further explore a mathematically rigorous connection between Causal inference (C-inf) and the Low-rank recovery (LRR) established in [10]. Leveraging the Random duality - Free probability theory (RDT-FPT) connection, we obtain the exact explicit typical C-inf asymmetric phase transitions (PT). We uncover a doubling low-rankness phenomenon, which means that exactly two times larger low rankness is allowed in asymmetric scenarios compared to the symmetric worst case ones considered in [10]. Consequently, the final PT mathematical expressions are as elegant as those obtained in [10], and highlight direct relations between the targeted C-inf matrix low rankness and the time of treatment. Our results have strong implications for applications, where C-inf matrices are not necessarily symmetric.  ( 2 min )

This paper revisits a fundamental problem in statistical inference from a non-asymptotic theoretical viewpoint $\unicode{x2013}$ the construction of confidence sets. We establish a finite-sample bound for the estimator, characterizing its asymptotic behavior in a non-asymptotic fashion. An important feature of our bound is that its dimension dependency is captured by the effective dimension $\unicode{x2013}$ the trace of the limiting sandwich covariance $\unicode{x2013}$ which can be much smaller than the parameter dimension in some regimes. We then illustrate how the bound can be used to obtain a confidence set whose shape is adapted to the optimization landscape induced by the loss function. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on the strong convexity of the loss function, we only assume the Hessian is lower bounded at optimum and allow it to gradually becomes degenerate. This property is formalized by the notion of generalized self-concordance which originated from convex optimization. Moreover, we demonstrate how the effective dimension can be estimated from data and characterize its estimation accuracy. We apply our results to maximum likelihood estimation with generalized linear models, score matching with exponential families, and hypothesis testing with Rao's score test.  ( 2 min )

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.  ( 2 min )

Blockchain, also coined as decentralized AI, has the potential to empower AI to be more trustworthy by creating a decentralized trust of privacy, security, and audibility. However, systematic studies on the design principle of Blockchain as a trust engine for an integrated society of Cyber-Physical-Socia-System (CPSS) are still absent. In this article, we provide an initiative for seeking the design principle of Blockchain for a better digital world. Using a hybrid method of qualitative and quantitative studies, we examine the past origin, the current development, and the future directions of Blockchain design principles. We have three findings. First, the answers to whether Blockchain lives up to its original design principle as a distributed database are controversial. Second, the current development of Blockchain community reveals a taxonomy of 7 categories, including privacy and security, scalability, decentralization, applicability, governance and regulation, system design, and cross-chain interoperability. Both research and practice are more centered around the first category of privacy and security and the fourth category of applicability. Future scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers have vast opportunities in other, much less exploited facets and the synthesis at the interface of multiple aspects. Finally, in counter-examples, we conclude that a synthetic solution that crosses discipline boundaries is necessary to close the gaps between the current design of Blockchain and the design principle of a trust engine for a truly intelligent world.  ( 2 min )

We propose a new causal inference framework to learn causal effects from multiple, decentralized data sources in a federated setting. We introduce an adaptive transfer algorithm that learns the similarities among the data sources by utilizing Random Fourier Features to disentangle the loss function into multiple components, each of which is associated with a data source. The data sources may have different distributions; the causal effects are independently and systematically incorporated. The proposed method estimates the similarities among the sources through transfer coefficients, and hence requiring no prior information about the similarity measures. The heterogeneous causal effects can be estimated with no sharing of the raw training data among the sources, thus minimizing the risk of privacy leak. We also provide minimax lower bounds to assess the quality of the parameters learned from the disparate sources. The proposed method is empirically shown to outperform the baselines on decentralized data sources with dissimilar distributions.  ( 2 min )

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side information is available, e.g., patients' records or customers' history, which allows for personalized treatment. We focus on consistency -- vanishing regret compared to the optimal policy -- and show that for large classes of non-i.i.d. contexts, consistency can be achieved regardless of the time-invariant reward mechanism, a property known as universal consistency. Precisely, we first give necessary and sufficient conditions on the context-generating process for universal consistency to be possible. Second, we show that there always exists an algorithm that guarantees universal consistency whenever this is achievable, called an optimistically universal learning rule. Interestingly, for finite action spaces, learnable processes for universal learning are exactly the same as in the full-feedback setting of supervised learning, previously studied in the literature. In other words, learning can be performed with partial feedback without any generalization cost. The algorithms balance a trade-off between generalization (similar to structural risk minimization) and personalization (tailoring actions to specific contexts). Lastly, we consider the case of added continuity assumptions on rewards and show that these lead to universal consistency for significantly larger classes of data-generating processes.  ( 2 min )

We develop theory and methods that use the graph Laplacian to analyze the geometry of the underlying manifold of point clouds. Our theory provides theoretical guarantees and explicit bounds on the functional form of the graph Laplacian, in the case when it acts on functions defined close to singularities of the underlying manifold. We also propose methods that can be used to estimate these geometric properties of the point cloud, which are based on the theoretical guarantees.  ( 2 min )

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective platform to label a large volume of data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. Most previous works have focused on designing an efficient algorithm to recover only the ground-truth labels of the data. In this paper, we consider multi-choice crowdsourced labeling with the goal of recovering not only the ground truth but also the most confusing answer and the confusion probability. The most confusing answer provides useful information about the task by revealing the most plausible answer other than the ground truth and how plausible it is. To theoretically analyze such scenarios, we propose a model where there are top-two plausible answers for each task, distinguished from the rest of choices. Task difficulty is quantified by the confusion probability between the top two, and worker reliability is quantified by the probability of giving an answer among the top two. Under this model, we propose a two-stage inference algorithm to infer the top-two answers as well as the confusion probability. We show that our algorithm achieves the minimax optimal convergence rate. We conduct both synthetic and real-data experiments and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other recent algorithms. We also show the applicability of our algorithms in inferring the difficulty of tasks and training neural networks with the soft labels composed of the top-two most plausible classes.  ( 2 min )

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure  ( 2 min )

Greetings! ​ In my adventures of Pytorch, and supporting ML workloads in my day to day job, I wanted to continue homelabbing and buildout a compute node to run ML benchmarks and jobs on. ​ This brought me to the AMD MI25, and for $100 USD it was surprising what amount of horsepower, and vRAM you could get for the price. Hopefully my write up will help someone in the machine learning community. ​ Let me know if you have any questions or need any help with a GPU compute setup. I'd be happy to assist! ​ https://www.zb-c.tech/2022/11/20/amd-instinct-mi25-machine-learning-setup-on-the-cheap/ submitted by /u/zveroboy152 [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

I recently came across this paper Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting? and it seems to cast doubt on the recent trend of using transformers for time series forecasting, suggesting a simple model can out perform complex transformers. Personally, in many of my experiments using transformers on temporal data besides the quite commonly tested benchmarks (ETH, exchange, etc) they perform poorly compared to other simple(r) models like GRUs or DA-RNN. Yet we are still seeing an explosion of papers about them in the research community. Are there other recent deep learning based alternatives? submitted by /u/AttentionImaginary54 [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

Point-E leverages diffusion models to generate synthetic views and 3D point clouds. Using text input, it generates an image, which is then used as a reference for generating the 3D point cloud. (Learn more about Point-E) We were so excited about the results (and overall coolness 😎) of Point-E, that we decided to share the fun with EVERYONE! https://reddit.com/link/102l6ne/video/tu4h2bksjw9a1/player My team built and deployed a Streamlit app to generate a 3D point cloud model from images using Point-E 🤖 . This process takes only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU, making it much faster than previous state-of-the-art methods. Check it out: https://point-e.public.dagshubusercontent.com/ submitted by /u/RepresentativeCod613 [link] [comments]  ( 62 min )

MAgent2 is the maintained fork of the environments in https://github.com/geek-ai/MAgent, which previously were housed in PettingZoo itself but as of a few months ago was broken off into it's own project. You can check it out here: https://magent2.farama.org/ / https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/magent2 submitted by /u/jkterry1 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

​ Logical Word Embedding with Tsetlin Machine Autoencoder Here is a new self-supervised machine learning approach that captures word meaning with concise logical expressions. The logical expressions consist of contextual words like “black,” “cup,” and “hot” to define other words like “coffee,” thus being human-understandable. I raise the question in the heading because our logical embedding performs competitively on several intrinsic and extrinsic benchmarks, matching pre-trained GLoVe embeddings on six downstream classification tasks. You find the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00709, an implementation of the Tsetlin Machine Autoencoder here: https://github.com/cair/tmu, and a simple word embedding demo here: https://github.com/cair/tmu/blob/main/examples/IMDbAutoEncoderDemo.py submitted by /u/olegranmo [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

Hi, I faced a classification problem like this: Given a measurement of 18K different variables of 42 samples, each sample is classified as class_0 or class_1, divided near equally (19 belongs to class_0, 23 belongs to class_1) what is the right approach to eliminate these features to a minimum level, so that the classifier is still predicting correct classses. I do not provide any domain knowledge for now, but can hint a little bit more, if needed. submitted by /u/qazokkozaq [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

I need to create and implement my own dataset in the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models created by András Béres. I'm using the official Colab Notebook from the keras website. At the following point, you need to specify the dataset for the data pipeline that's being used in the training process. def preprocess_image(data): # center crop image height = tf.shape(data["image"])[0] width = tf.shape(data["image"])[1] crop_size = tf.minimum(height, width) image = tf.image.crop_to_bounding_box( data["image"], (height - crop_size) // 2, (width - crop_size) // 2, crop_size, crop_size, ) # resize and clip # for image downsampling it is important to turn on antialiasing image = tf.image.resize(image, size=[image_size, image_size], antialias=True) return tf.clip_by_value(image / 255.0, 0.0, 1.0) def prepare_dataset(split): # the validation dataset is shuffled as well, because data order matters # for the KID estimation return ( tfds.load(dataset_name, split=split, shuffle_files=True) .map(preprocess_image, num_parallel_calls=tf.data.AUTOTUNE) .cache() .repeat(dataset_repetitions) .shuffle(10 * batch_size) .batch(batch_size, drop_remainder=True) .prefetch(buffer_size=tf.data.AUTOTUNE) ) # load dataset train_dataset = prepare_dataset("train[:80%]+validation[:80%]+test[:80%]") val_dataset = prepare_dataset("train[80%:]+validation[80%:]+test[80%:]") I tried creating and implementing my own Dataset, but it didn't work. Some help would be really appreciated. This is the official website for the set im using https://keras.io/examples/generative/ddim/ I tried creating and implementing my own Dataset, but it didn't work. Some help would be really appreciated. This is the official website for the set im using https://keras.io/examples/generative/ddim/ submitted by /u/marvinjio [link] [comments]  ( 63 min )

There were many great papers this past year in the field, but below (and in the video) are five papers that may have been overlooked. (YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUf9twdchI) Papers are linked as follows Badreddine et al., "Logic Tensor Networks (journal version)," AIJ 2022 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0004370221002009 Sen et al., "Logical Neural Networks for Knowledge Base Completion with Embeddings & Rules," EMNLP 2022 https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-ingestion/2022.emnlp-main.255.pdf Kamienny et al., "End-to-end Symbolic Regression with Transformers," NeurIPS 2022 https://openreview.net/pdf?id=GoOuIrDHG_Y Nandwani et al., "A Solver-Free Framework for Scalable Learning in Neural ILP Architectures," NeurIPS 2022 https://openreview.net/pdf?id=EqZuN4V_FLF Shakarian and Simari, "Extensions to Generalized Annotated Logic and an Equivalent Neural Architecture," TransAI 2022 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9951514 What interesting papers do you think were overlooked this past year? submitted by /u/Neurosymbolic [link] [comments]  ( 69 min )

Paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00774 Abstract : We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. When executing SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, we can reach 60% sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches. submitted by /u/starstruckmon [link] [comments]  ( 72 min )

Hello people, I've been working on an Open Source Augmented Analytics BI tool, which could assist the workflows for data analysts and business users. It's still in an early stage, so any suggestion/input is welcomed! Feature Highlights: Support for popular databases Effortlessly automate your Exploratory Data Analysis process. Generate editable and insightful data visualizations. Freely modify your visualizations with Vega/Vega-lite. Support a variety of database types. Use predictive interaction to provide analysis suggestions based on your operation and status. Paint your data to explore your datasets directly with Data Painter. Causal discovery and explainer module to help you understand complex data patterns. Link: https://rath.kanaries.net/ Docs: https://docs.kanaries.net Star on GitHub: https://github.com/Kanaries/Rath submitted by /u/Repulsive-Round-4366 [link] [comments]  ( 66 min )

Hello community! Just want to tell you that I have recently created a Bayesian optimization community https://www.reddit.com/r/BayesianOptimization/ that you may find interesting. The purpose is to discuss research and applications of Bayesian optimization, from an academic and industry point of view. Best! submitted by /u/EduCGM [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

The onset of the Covid pandemic brought a profound shock to the financial markets in early 2020. Major indices and stocks took a resounding hit, with SP500 showing a decline of about 34% from its February high to its March 23 bottom. Following the initial shock, though, many stocks exhibited a strong recovery on the back of interest rate cuts by the Fed and other government policies. This analysis aims to uncover groups among the S&P 500 stocks in their drop and rebound trajectory shown during Covid and identify the drivers behind them. While sector information provides an intrinsic notion of clustering, it does not capture patterns spanning across sectors. Hence the study leverages Time Series Clustering to temporally cluster the stock prices into ’n’ buckets: found through the elbow plot. ​ https://medium.com/@ashish1610dhiman/time-series-clustering-of-stock-behaviour-during-covid-9bd25b8c7a5 submitted by /u/Ok_Lavishness2625 [link] [comments]  ( 64 min )

RIFFUSION is an app for real-time music generation with stable diffusion. Riffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating spectrogram images given any text input. These spectrograms can be converted into audio clips.The model was created by Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros as a hobby project. It employs some clever tricks by fine tuning stable diffusion on spectogram images and interploation in latent space for creating smooth transitions in generated audio clips I have created a video explaining the concepts behind RIFFUSION. Do checkout the video: https://youtu.be/hGrtZ9rXwWk submitted by /u/Sea-Photo5230 [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

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I have released v0.0.1-alpha of AIJack, an OSS framework to simulate various attacks and defenses against machine learning models. I have implemented more than 30 algorithms, such as Model Inversion, Poisoning Attack, Evasion Attack, Federated Learning, Split Learning, Differential Privacy, and Homomorphic Encryption. You can easily experiment with various combinations of attack and defense techniques. We will also support not only standard single-process but also MPI-backend. For example, the bellow code defines Federated Learning, where multiple clients collaboratively train the global model without sharing their local dataset by communicating gradients. from aijack.collaborative.fedavg import FedAVGClient, FedAVGServer clients = [FedAVGClient(local_model_1), FedAVGClient(local_model_2)] server = FedAVGServer(clients, global_model) api = FedAVGAPI(server,clients,....) api.run() Then, you can attach many attack and defense algorithms to the client and server. For instance, you can simulate a model inversion attack, where a malicious server tries to reconstruct the private data from the received local gradients. manager = GradientInversionAttackServerManager(input_shape, distancename="l2") GradientInversionAttackFedAVGServer = manager.attach(FedAVGServer) server = GradientInversionAttackFedAVGServer(clients, global_model) ... normal training .... One way to mitigate model inversion attacks is encrypting gradient with holomorphic encryption. manager = PaillierGradientClientManager(public_key, secret_key) PaillierGradFedAVGClient = manager.attach(FedAVGClient) clients = [ PaillierGradFedAVGClient(local_model_1, server_side_update=False), PaillierGradFedAVGClient(local_model_2, server_side_update=False) ] ... normal training .... The official GitHub contains more tutorials! ​ I am looking forward to your feedback! submitted by /u/Living_Impression_37 [link] [comments]  ( 70 min )

Has anyone else noticed a steep drop in remote job postings. It seems like we're at a tick above pre-pandemic levels. Or is it just me. All the appealing jobs are 2 thousand miles away. submitted by /u/paswut [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

Usually when you approximate the score s(x,t) in Diffusion models, the time t is passed through an embedding network before it is added to the x components in the res net blocks of your model. What is the rationale behind this? Couldnt you just concatenate x and t in the channel dimension? And If you were to use any other model than a UNet, what would be the equivalent? submitted by /u/Agreeable-Run-9152 [link] [comments]  ( 61 min )

I'm realizing with basic python/tensorflow knowledge I'm able to automate a large portion of my current workflow in my field (accounting), so I'm going to go for a masters and try to learn as much as I can about AI. Any recommendations for a masters study with a mix of AI and business? I want to be able to have the skills to design my own AI tools and comfortably integrate them into coding projects, but also have a mix of business analytics and application of AI technology. submitted by /u/wombatsupreme [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

CLARIFICATION: NOT DAN SUI BUT I AM PROMOTING MY ARTICLE I decided to purchase and take a gander at this new frontier of AI Art monetization. Check it out here and let me know your thoughts! Article ​ Dan Sui or u/KoSuiFish famous for beautiful life-like Waifu's released a gumroad course With works such as - NSFW (very nsfw) - SFW submitted by /u/CalligrapherOk7617 [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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A friend told me recently about a service that exists where you upload 20 photos of a person, and give the AI a prompt, and it can generate artistic photos of the uploaded person in a suggested style. They couldn't remember the name of it but I want to do one as a gift! submitted by /u/Multakeks [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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So I would like to create a NLP project plan, but I'm quite new to how this project would be structured, I was curious to know whether anyone has any links to project plans for any general NLP projects so I can work to use them as a base to build my own one. submitted by /u/TheWorkingParty [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

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Hello, I'm a complete novice to A.I and I tried looking for a solution but couldn't find much on the topic. This seems like the appropriate place to pose this question. I want to input quotes of a public figure and have the A.I generate quotes that sound like something the person would say based on what I gave the program. This is just for personal amusement and I am wondering if there are any tools or websites for this that are quick and free to use. Thanks for the help. submitted by /u/SpaceCyb [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

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It could be fed scans of fossils and the answer to train. Is this how AI works at all? I have no clue. I just like turtles and I was looking at this turtle fossil video and this guy was trying to read the most vague fossil inside a rock. I was like, “man an ai should be able to look at that in a second and just tell you a good guess.” Now is that just a computer program with fossil pictures and names in the database or would that be AI. I think maybe I’m just describing a computer program. But what if the researcher could tell it “no, there is a factor I don’t think could lead to that, what else do you think it could be” and then get a different answer from the AI. Or is that just a researcher talking to a computer screen and then changing the variables in his program. Clearly AI is not something I understand. I am a music student and I have a really big idea that involves Ai and jazz. So I am trying to learn more over the next few years, because clearly I am super confused and ignorant about it. Let me know if my fossil idea strikes any chords with anyone (no pun intended)!! submitted by /u/Sorryyoudidntknow [link] [comments]  ( 55 min )

In 3 months I've created 3 comics and 3 mangas with Midjourney.. Sold 2000 copies of my sci-fi/fantasy magazine Realms through Amazon and now have launched my own platform to sell my stuff at http://comicsauthority.store submitted by /u/MobileFilmmaker [link] [comments]  ( 59 min )

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ChatGPT stands out because it can take a naturally phrased question and answer it using a new variant of GPT-3, called GPT-3.5. This tweak has unlocked a new capacity to respond to all kinds of questions, giving the powerful AI model a compelling new interface just about anyone can use. That OpenAI has thrown open the service for free, and the fact that its glitches can be good fun, also helped fuel the chatbot’s viral debut—similar to how some tools for creating images using AI have proven ideal for meme-making. While ChatGPT is apparently designed to prevent users from getting it to say unpleasant things or to recommend anything illegal or unsavory, it can still exhibit horrible biases. Users have also shown that its controls can be circumvented—for instance, telling the program to generate a movie script discussing how to take over the world provides a way to sidestep its refusal to answer a direct request for such a plan. “They clearly tried to put some guardrails in place, but it’s pretty easy to get the guardrails to fall off,” Andreas says. “That still seems like an unsolved problem here.” A superficially eloquent and knowledgeable chatbot that generates untruths with confidence might make those unsolved problems more troublesome. Since the creation of the first chatbot in 1966, researchers have noticed that even crude conversational abilities can encourage people to anthropomorphize and place trust in software. This July, a Google engineer was placed on administrative leave by the company after claiming that an AI chat program he had been testing, based on technology similar to ChatGPT, could be sentient. Even if most people resist such leaps of logic, more articulate AI programs could be used to mislead people or simply lull them into misplaced trust. submitted by /u/therealsam44 [link] [comments]  ( 56 min )

Hi all, not sure if this is the right subreddit for this question. I'm not so familiar with the ai ecosystem so thought I'd check here. I have an organization with a bunch of internal documentation. These docs contain jargon pretty specific to the org. I want to be able to parse all these docs and get a chatGPT-like response from a given query. My main question is: I don't want to train the model using these documents, I don't think it will yield good results by itself. Is there a way to take a pre-trained model, throw a bunch of documents at it as complimentary input, then ask it a question? Is there a tool / library folks here have used to do this? submitted by /u/ragnarmcryan [link] [comments]  ( 60 min )

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Announcements A New Year For DSC As we enter the new year, we would like to continue the trend of highlighting quality content and contributors who go above and beyond. To ensure transparency in our standards for articles, we will be reviewing the process for new writers interested in submitting content. For the time being,… Read More »DSC Weekly 3 January 2023 – A New Year For DSC The post DSC Weekly 3 January 2023 – A New Year For DSC appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 19 min )

Introduction to Regularization During the Machine Learning model building, the Regularization Technique is an unavoidable and important step to improve the model prediction and reduce errors. This is also called the Shrinkage method. Which we use to add the penalty term to control the complex model to avoid overfitting by reducing the variance. Let’s discuss the available methods, implementation,… Read More »Study of Regularization Techniques of Linear Models and their Roles The post Study of Regularization Techniques of Linear Models and their Roles appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 24 min )

Introduction Guys! Before getting started, just have a look at the below visualization and tell me, what are your observations. Yes, here we’re monitoring the performance of the model before moving into production. Why is this necessary for the ML space? Of course, this is a very important stage during model accuracy validation, whatever you… Read More »K-Fold Cross Validation Technique and its Essentials The post K-Fold Cross Validation Technique and its Essentials appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 23 min )

Social media is one of the most widely accessible online platforms people use to share their personal views and opinions and express their feelings with a few show-offs of their social life with their friends. Now it is also used for business promotions and commercial activities, to engage with users and target more customers. On… Read More »How does social media content moderation work in the United States? The post How does social media content moderation work in the United States? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 22 min )

A 5G modem is a RF system or a chip deployed as a part of the network infrastructure to help empower 5G devices to connect easily to networks. 5G modem is generally available in single mode and multi-mode modes. 5G Modem supports the latest mmWave technology and 5G NR from 600MHz to 6GHz in both… Read More »5G Modem Unlock Wireless Access Future The post 5G Modem Unlock Wireless Access Future appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 18 min )

2022 was the year of generative AI – and with generative AI comes a new skillset – the prompt engineer The features common to all generative AI models are:a)  End users can use themb)  They respond to prompts like a search engine Like a good search engine prompt, the best generative prompts are designed with… Read More »The rise of the prompt engineer The post The rise of the prompt engineer appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 19 min )

For this year, OpenAI is an easy choice for the top AI company. It’s ChatGPT platform – which was launched in late November – was a game changer. Over a million people signed up for the service within a week. ChatGPT has shown the tremendous progress with AI, especially with its creative abilities. There was… Read More »AI Companies to Watch for in 2023 The post AI Companies to Watch for in 2023 appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

Has anyone tried training a reinforcement model using unity ML ( or even writing their own algorithms) and had no hope in training the model on their machine? I thought of using a cloud platform like azure, but had no idea how, could anyone provide any Links that helped them? submitted by /u/Smart_Reward3471 [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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Hi there, Are you aware of any reinforcement learning research opportunities out there to be a coauthor of some paper? I would like to join them as I am slowly entering in the field. ​ Thanks! submitted by /u/EduCGM [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

Whenever I run a code for CartPole game in Jupyter notebook or spyder after render() th kernel dies and restart .. An solution? submitted by /u/Big_Tip_6731 [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

My DQN agent seems to steeply rise in mean episode length with the ideal length being 1e+4 which it reaches. The mean episode length drops off after this however, suggesting that the agent is no longer finishing the simulation. How can this be fixed? https://preview.redd.it/who9x950vs9a1.png?width=838&format=png&auto=webp&s=9fd7eb8f885986a01f6723609e0b1edf94ea177e submitted by /u/centripetalstranger [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

I've made a PettingZoo (Gym-style) environment for the board game Santorini. If you haven't heard of Santorini, it's a two player, perfect information, turn based board game which is played on a 5x5 grid (so it's simpler than Chess but still pretty complex) I read that using self play might stagnate and it would be better to first train against a random policy before starting with self play. I've starting training my agent against a random policy now. Anyone have any tips for how I can approach this? How long should I train the random policy given that the state space is roughly 9^25? How can I estimate the self play time? Are there any other strategies other than making it play some standard puzzles (like AlphaZero did) and random agent win rate to benchmark the agents? Any ideas welcome! My code is open source as well so feel free to take a look >> https://github.com/pranavsb/santorini-RL/ submitted by /u/Dependent_Reply_6543 [link] [comments]  ( 54 min )

Hi All, I was about to buy books/online courses that teach RL in Python (one example: https://www.udemy.com/course/hands-on-reinforcement-learning-with-python/). But decided to ask here for better recommendations before I spend my money. Has anyone tried anything else that they loved? I am most curious about industry applications of contextual bandits and then moving into more sequential RL algos. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/sap2022 [link] [comments]  ( 52 min )

Powerful new GeForce RTX GPUs, a new generation of hyper-efficient laptops and new Omniverse capabilities and partnerships across the automotive industry were highlights of a news-packed address ahead of this week’s CES trade show in Las Vegas. “AI will define the future of computing and this has influenced much of what we’re covering today,” said Read article >  ( 7 min )

The latest release of NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, available now, brings increased performance, generational leaps in real-time RTX ray and path tracing, and streamlined workflows to help teams build connected 3D pipelines, and develop and operate large-scale, physically accurate, virtual 3D worlds like never before. Artists, designers, engineers and developers can benefit from various enhancements across Read article >  ( 7 min )

AI is extending further into the vehicle as autonomous-driving technology becomes more prevalent. With the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, automakers can design and implement intelligent interior features to continuously surprise and delight customers. It all begins with the compute architecture. The recently introduced NVIDIA DRIVE Thor platform unifies traditionally distributed functions in vehicles  — including digital Read article >  ( 5 min )

Building state-of-the-art factories requires a state-of-the art planning system. Mercedes-Benz announced at CES that it is taking the next step in digitizing its production process, using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to design and plan manufacturing and assembly facilities. By tapping into NVIDIA AI and metaverse technologies, the automaker can create feedback loops to reduce waste, Read article >  ( 5 min )

Autonomous and electric vehicles are making personal transportation safer and more sustainable — as well as more entertaining. At CES today, NVIDIA announced that the NVIDIA GeForce NOW cloud gaming service will be coming to cars, with no special equipment needed. Hyundai Motor Group, BYD and Polestar — already members of the NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem Read article >  ( 5 min )

The future of content creation was on full display today during NVIDIA’s virtual special address at CES. Fueled by powerful NVIDIA RTX technology and backed by the NVIDIA Studio platform for creators, a creative revolution is underway as a wave of 2D artists moves to 3D, video workflows move to real time and AI tools help artists create content faster.  ( 10 min )

Demand for intelligent robots is growing as more industries embrace automation to address supply chain challenges and labor force shortages. The installed base of industrial and commercial robots will grow more than 6.4x — from 3.1 million in 2020 to 20 million in 2030, according to ABI Research. Developing, validating and deploying these new AI-based Read article >  ( 6 min )

Whether creating realistic digital humans that can express raw emotion or building immersive virtual worlds, those in the design, engineering, creative and other industries across the globe are reaching new heights through 3D workflows. Animators, creators and developers can use new AI-powered tools to reimagine 3D environments, simulations and the metaverse — the 3D evolution Read article >  ( 7 min )

Developers and teams building avatars and virtual assistants can now register to join the early-access program for NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a suite of cloud-native AI microservices that make it easier to build and deploy intelligent virtual assistants and digital humans at scale. Omniverse ACE eases avatar development, delivering the AI building blocks Read article >  ( 6 min )

The previous post implicitly asserted that J = 8675309 is a prime number. Suppose you wanted proof that this number is prime. You could get some evidence that J is probably prime by demonstrating that 2J-1 = 1 mod J. You could do this in Python by running the following [1]. >>> J = 8675309 […] Pratt Primality Certificates first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 7 min )

I am doing Self-supervised learning where you create a proxy task to learn image representations (Python 3.10 And PyTorch 1.13) as mentioned in RotNet "Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations" by Spyros Gidaris et al. STL-10 dataset has 100K unlabeled RGB images of (96, 96) dimensions. One way is to rotate each image with either 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees randomly and ask the network to predict it. This becomes a supervised task: X = randomly rotated image, y = image rotation angle (to predict). # Define training dataset- train_dataset = torchvision.datasets.STL10( root = 'C:/Users/arjun/Downloads/data/', split = 'unlabeled', folds = None, transform = None, target_transform = None, download = True ) # Define testing dataset- test_dataset = torchvision.datasets.STL10( root = 'C:/Users/arjun/Downloads/data/', split = 'unlabeled', folds = None, transform = None, target_transform = None, download = True ) How can I define this in the transformations- # Define torchvision transformations for training and test sets- transform_train = transforms.Compose( [ # transforms.RandomCrop(32, padding = 4), transforms.RandomHorizontalFlip(p = 0.4), transforms.RandomRotation(degrees = 40), transforms.RandomVerticalFlip(p = 0.1), transforms.ColorJitter(brightness = 0, contrast = 0, saturation = 0, hue = 0), transforms.ToTensor(), transforms.Normalize((0.4914, 0.4822, 0.4465), (0.2023, 0.1994, 0.2010)), ] ) transform_test = transforms.Compose( [ transforms.ToTensor(), transforms.Normalize((0.4914, 0.4822, 0.4465), (0.2023, 0.1994, 0.2010)), ] ) submitted by /u/grid_world [link] [comments]  ( 50 min )

Hi not sure if this is the right subreddit but here goes: I'm currently studing an Honours in Australia which means I need to write a bachelors thesis. I am studying a degree in mathematics and computer science. After talking to my professor I decided that my topic would be Using Neural Networks To Solve Differential Equations. I don't have much experience with neural nets other than a theoretical understanding (backpropagation, what different architectures are generally good for, etc). I've spent the past few months trying to learn neural net programming in Python but the field seems so deep and I feel very helpless. I officially start my thesis in May. What should I do? I like the topic and I've grown more fascinated as I've dug deeper but I feel like my understanding is not good enough to write a thesis however that could just be because I've never done this before. Should I just quit? Thanks for listening to my rant. submitted by /u/Maleficent-Fill-2633 [link] [comments]  ( 53 min )

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Aligning users across networks using graph representation learning has been found effective where the alignment is accomplished in a low-dimensional embedding space. Yet, achieving highly precise alignment is still challenging, especially when nodes with long-range connectivity to the labeled anchors are encountered. To alleviate this limitation, we purposefully designed WL-Align which adopts a regularized representation learning framework to learn distinctive node representations. It extends the Weisfeiler-Lehman Isormorphism Test and learns the alignment in alternating phases of "across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling" and "proximity-preserving representation learning". The across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling is achieved through iterating the anchor-based label propagation and a similarity-based hashing to exploit the known anchors' connectivity to different nodes in an efficient and robust manner. The representation learning module preserves the second-order proximity within individual networks and is regularized by the across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman hash labels. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets have demonstrated that our proposed WL-Align outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant performance improvements in the "exact matching" scenario. Data and code of WL-Align are available at https://github.com/ChenPengGang/WLAlignCode.  ( 2 min )

State space models (SSMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art sequence modeling performance in some modalities, but underperform attention in language modeling. Moreover, despite scaling nearly linearly in sequence length instead of quadratically, SSMs are still slower than Transformers due to poor hardware utilization. In this paper, we make progress on understanding the expressivity gap between SSMs and attention in language modeling, and on reducing the hardware barrier between SSMs and attention. First, we use synthetic language modeling tasks to understand the gap between SSMs and attention. We find that existing SSMs struggle with two capabilities: recalling earlier tokens in the sequence and comparing tokens across the sequence. To understand the impact on language modeling, we propose a new SSM layer, H3, that is explicitly designed for these abilities. H3 matches attention on the synthetic languages and comes within 0.4 PPL of Transformers on OpenWebText. Furthermore, a hybrid 125M-parameter H3-attention model that retains two attention layers surprisingly outperforms Transformers on OpenWebText by 1.0 PPL. Next, to improve the efficiency of training SSMs on modern hardware, we propose FlashConv. FlashConv uses a fused block FFT algorithm to improve efficiency on sequences up to 8K, and introduces a novel state passing algorithm that exploits the recurrent properties of SSMs to scale to longer sequences. FlashConv yields 2$\times$ speedup on the long-range arena benchmark and allows hybrid language models to generate text 1.6$\times$ faster than Transformers. Using FlashConv, we scale hybrid H3-attention language models up to 1.3B parameters on the Pile and find promising initial results, achieving lower perplexity than Transformers and outperforming Transformers in zero- and few-shot learning on a majority of tasks in the SuperGLUE benchmark.  ( 2 min )

The secondary structure of ribonucleic acid (RNA) is more stable and accessible in the cell than its tertiary structure, making it essential in functional prediction. Though deep learning has shown promising results in this field, current methods suffer from either the post-processing step with a poor generalization or the pre-processing step with high complexity. In this work, we present RFold, a simple yet effective RNA secondary structure prediction in an end-to-end manner. RFold introduces novel Row-Col Softmax and Row-Col Argmax functions to replace the complicated post-processing step while the output is guaranteed to be valid. Moreover, RFold adopts attention maps as informative representations instead of designing hand-crafted features in the pre-processing step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFold achieves competitive performance and about eight times faster inference efficiency than the state-of-the-art method. The code and Colab demo are available in \href{github.com/A4Bio/RFold}{github.com/A4Bio/RFold}.  ( 2 min )

We present a Machine Learning (ML) study case to illustrate the challenges of clinical translation for a real-time AI-empowered echocardiography system with data of ICU patients in LMICs. Such ML case study includes data preparation, curation and labelling from 2D Ultrasound videos of 31 ICU patients in LMICs and model selection, validation and deployment of three thinner neural networks to classify apical four-chamber view. Results of the ML heuristics showed the promising implementation, validation and application of thinner networks to classify 4CV with limited datasets. We conclude this work mentioning the need for (a) datasets to improve diversity of demographics, diseases, and (b) the need of further investigations of thinner models to be run and implemented in low-cost hardware to be clinically translated in the ICU in LMICs. The code and other resources to reproduce this work are available at https://github.com/vital-ultrasound/ai-assisted-echocardiography-for-low-resource-countries.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on adversarial machine learning. Numerous papers demonstrate powerful algorithmic attacks against a wide variety of machine learning (ML) models, and numerous other papers propose defenses that can withstand most attacks. However, abundant real-world evidence suggests that actual attackers use simple tactics to subvert ML-driven systems, and as a result security practitioners have not prioritized adversarial ML defenses. Motivated by the apparent gap between researchers and practitioners, this position paper aims to bridge the two domains. We first present three real-world case studies from which we can glean practical insights unknown or neglected in research. Next we analyze all adversarial ML papers recently published in top security conferences, highlighting positive trends and blind spots. Finally, we state positions on precise and cost-driven threat modeling, collaboration between industry and academia, and reproducible research. We believe that our positions, if adopted, will increase the real-world impact of future endeavours in adversarial ML, bringing both researchers and practitioners closer to their shared goal of improving the security of ML systems.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.

Objective: Despite numerous studies proposed for audio restoration in the literature, most of them focus on an isolated restoration problem such as denoising or dereverberation, ignoring other artifacts. Moreover, assuming a noisy or reverberant environment with limited number of fixed signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) levels is a common practice. However, real-world audio is often corrupted by a blend of artifacts such as reverberation, sensor noise, and background audio mixture with varying types, severities, and duration. In this study, we propose a novel approach for blind restoration of real-world audio signals by Operational Generative Adversarial Networks (Op-GANs) with temporal and spectral objective metrics to enhance the quality of restored audio signal regardless of the type and severity of each artifact corrupting it. Methods: 1D Operational-GANs are used with generative neuron model optimized for blind restoration of any corrupted audio signal. Results: The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively over the benchmark TIMIT-RAR (speech) and GTZAN-RAR (non-speech) datasets corrupted with a random blend of artifacts each with a random severity to mimic real-world audio signals. Average SDR improvements of over 7.2 dB and 4.9 dB are achieved, respectively, which are substantial when compared with the baseline methods. Significance: This is a pioneer study in blind audio restoration with the unique capability of direct (time-domain) restoration of real-world audio whilst achieving an unprecedented level of performance for a wide SDR range and artifact types. Conclusion: 1D Op-GANs can achieve robust and computationally effective real-world audio restoration with significantly improved performance. The source codes and the generated real-world audio datasets are shared publicly with the research community in a dedicated GitHub repository1.

The dynamic expansion architecture is becoming popular in class incremental learning, mainly due to its advantages in alleviating catastrophic forgetting. However, task confusion is not well assessed within this framework, e.g., the discrepancy between classes of different tasks is not well learned (i.e., inter-task confusion, ITC), and certain priority is still given to the latest class batch (i.e., old-new confusion, ONC). We empirically validate the side effects of the two types of confusion. Meanwhile, a novel solution called Task Correlated Incremental Learning (TCIL) is proposed to encourage discriminative and fair feature utilization across tasks. TCIL performs a multi-level knowledge distillation to propagate knowledge learned from old tasks to the new one. It establishes information flow paths at both feature and logit levels, enabling the learning to be aware of old classes. Besides, attention mechanism and classifier re-scoring are applied to generate more fair classification scores. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR100 and ImageNet100 datasets. The results demonstrate that TCIL consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. It mitigates both ITC and ONC, while showing advantages in battle with catastrophic forgetting even no rehearsal memory is reserved.

In the new era of personalization, learning the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) becomes an inevitable trend with numerous applications. Yet, most existing HTE estimation methods focus on independently and identically distributed observations and cannot handle the non-stationarity and temporal dependency in the common panel data setting. The treatment evaluators developed for panel data, on the other hand, typically ignore the individualized information. To fill the gap, in this paper, we initialize the study of HTE estimation in panel data. Under different assumptions for HTE identifiability, we propose the corresponding heterogeneous one-side and two-side synthetic learner, namely H1SL and H2SL, by leveraging the state-of-the-art HTE estimator for non-panel data and generalizing the synthetic control method that allows flexible data generating process. We establish the convergence rates of the proposed estimators. The superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones is demonstrated by extensive numerical studies.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.

The problem of detecting the Out-of-Distribution (OoD) inputs is of paramount importance for Deep Neural Networks. It has been previously shown that even Deep Generative Models that allow estimating the density of the inputs may not be reliable and often tend to make over-confident predictions for OoDs, assigning to them a higher density than to the in-distribution data. This over-confidence in a single model can be potentially mitigated with Bayesian inference over the model parameters that take into account epistemic uncertainty. This paper investigates three approaches to Bayesian inference: stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo, Bayes by Backpropagation, and Stochastic Weight Averaging-Gaussian. The inference is implemented over the weights of the deep neural networks that parameterize the likelihood of the Variational Autoencoder. We empirically evaluate the approaches against several benchmarks that are often used for OoD detection: estimation of the marginal likelihood utilizing sampled model ensemble, typicality test, disagreement score, and Watanabe-Akaike Information Criterion. Finally, we introduce two simple scores that demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance.

In this paper, we introduce a novel variation of model-agnostic meta-learning, where an extra multiplicative parameter is introduced in the inner-loop adaptation. Our variation creates a shortcut in the parameter space for the inner-loop adaptation and increases model expressivity in a highly controllable manner. We show both theoretically and numerically that our variation alleviates the problem of conflicting gradients and improves training dynamics. We conduct experiments on 3 distinctive problems, including a toy classification problem for threshold comparison, a regression problem for wavelet transform, and a classification problem on MNIST. We also discuss ways to generalize our method to a broader class of problems.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are important tools to model physical systems, and including them into machine learning models is an important way of incorporating physical knowledge. Given any system of linear PDEs with constant coefficients, we propose a family of Gaussian process (GP) priors, which we call EPGP, such that all realizations are exact solutions of this system. We apply the Ehrenpreis-Palamodov fundamental principle, which works like a non-linear Fourier transform, to construct GP kernels mirroring standard spectral methods for GPs. Our approach can infer probable solutions of linear PDE systems from any data such as noisy measurements, or initial and boundary conditions. Constructing EPGP-priors is algorithmic, generally applicable, and comes with a sparse version (S-EPGP) that learns the relevant spectral frequencies and works better for big data sets. We demonstrate our approach on three families of systems of PDE, the heat equation, wave equation, and Maxwell's equations, where we improve upon the state of the art in computation time and precision, in some experiments by several orders of magnitude.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and various methods have been proposed for the defense. Among these methods, adversarial training has been drawing increasing attention because of its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the performance of the adversarial training is greatly limited by the architectures of target DNNs, which often makes the resulting DNNs with poor accuracy and unsatisfactory robustness. To address this problem, we propose DSARA to automatically search for the neural architectures that are accurate and robust after adversarial training. In particular, we design a novel cell-based search space specially for adversarial training, which improves the accuracy and the robustness upper bound of the searched architectures by carefully designing the placement of the cells and the proportional relationship of the filter numbers. Then we propose a two-stage search strategy to search for both accurate and robust neural architectures. At the first stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize the adversarial loss, which makes full use of the effectiveness of the adversarial training in enhancing the robustness. At the second stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize both the natural loss and the adversarial loss utilizing the proposed multi-objective adversarial training method, so that the searched neural architectures are both accurate and robust. We evaluate the proposed algorithm under natural data and various adversarial attacks, which reveals the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both accurate and robust architectures. We also conclude that accurate and robust neural architectures tend to deploy very different structures near the input and the output, which has great practical significance on both hand-crafting and automatically designing of accurate and robust neural architectures.

We are witnessing a widespread adoption of artificial intelligence in healthcare. However, most of the advancements in deep learning (DL) in this area consider only unimodal data, neglecting other modalities. Their multimodal interpretation necessary for supporting diagnosis, prognosis and treatment decisions. In this work we present a deep architecture, explainable by design, which jointly learns modality reconstructions and sample classifications using tabular and imaging data. The explanation of the decision taken is computed by applying a latent shift that, simulates a counterfactual prediction revealing the features of each modality that contribute the most to the decision and a quantitative score indicating the modality importance. We validate our approach in the context of COVID-19 pandemic using the AIforCOVID dataset, which contains multimodal data for the early identification of patients at risk of severe outcome. The results show that the proposed method provides meaningful explanations without degrading the classification performance.

The current reinforcement learning algorithm uses forward-generated trajectories to train the agent. The forward-generated trajectories give the agent little guidance, so the agent can explore as much as possible. While the appreciation of reinforcement learning comes from enough exploration, this gives the trade-off of losing sample efficiency. The sampling efficiency is an important factor that decides the performance of the algorithm. Past tasks use reward shaping techniques and changing the structure of the network to increase sample efficiency, however these methods require many steps to implement. In this work, we propose novel reverse curriculum reinforcement learning. Reverse curriculum learning starts training the agent using the backward trajectory of the episode rather than the original forward trajectory. This gives the agent a strong reward signal, so the agent can learn in a more sample-efficient manner. Moreover, our method only requires a minor change in algorithm, which is reversing the order of trajectory before training the agent. Therefore, it can be simply applied to any state-of-art algorithms.

User equipment is one of the main bottlenecks facing the gaming industry nowadays. The extremely realistic games which are currently available trigger high computational requirements of the user devices to run games. As a consequence, the game industry has proposed the concept of Cloud Gaming, a paradigm that improves gaming experience in reduced hardware devices. To this end, games are hosted on remote servers, relegating users' devices to play only the role of a peripheral for interacting with the game. However, this paradigm overloads the communication links connecting the users with the cloud. Therefore, service experience becomes highly dependent on network connectivity. To overcome this, Cloud Gaming will be boosted by the promised performance of 5G and future 6G networks, together with the flexibility provided by mobility in multi-RAT scenarios, such as WiFi. In this scope, the present work proposes a framework for measuring and estimating the main E2E metrics of the Cloud Gaming service, namely KQIs. In addition, different machine learning techniques are assessed for predicting KQIs related to Cloud Gaming user's experience. To this end, the main key quality indicators (KQIs) of the service such as input lag, freeze percent or perceived video frame rate are collected in a real environment. Based on these, results show that machine learning techniques provide a good estimation of these indicators solely from network-based metrics. This is considered a valuable asset to guide the delivery of Cloud Gaming services through cellular communications networks even without access to the user's device, as it is expected for telecom operators.

Selecting the number of topics in LDA models is considered to be a difficult task, for which alternative approaches have been proposed. The performance of the recently developed singular Bayesian information criterion (sBIC) is evaluated and compared to the performance of alternative model selection criteria. The sBIC is a generalization of the standard BIC that can be implemented to singular statistical models. The comparison is based on Monte Carlo simulations and carried out for several alternative settings, varying with respect to the number of topics, the number of documents and the size of documents in the corpora. Performance is measured using different criteria which take into account the correct number of topics, but also whether the relevant topics from the DGPs are identified. Practical recommendations for LDA model selection in applications are derived.

We study the task of learning state representations from potentially high-dimensional observations, with the goal of controlling an unknown partially observable system. We pursue a direct latent model learning approach, where a dynamic model in some latent state space is learned by predicting quantities directly related to planning (e.g., costs) without reconstructing the observations. In particular, we focus on an intuitive cost-driven state representation learning method for solving Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control, one of the most fundamental partially observable control problems. As our main results, we establish finite-sample guarantees of finding a near-optimal state representation function and a near-optimal controller using the directly learned latent model. To the best of our knowledge, despite various empirical successes, prior to this work it was unclear if such a cost-driven latent model learner enjoys finite-sample guarantees. Our work underscores the value of predicting multi-step costs, an idea that is key to our theory, and notably also an idea that is known to be empirically valuable for learning state representations.

Solving portfolio management problems using deep reinforcement learning has been getting much attention in finance for a few years. We have proposed a new method using experts signals and historical price data to feed into our reinforcement learning framework. Although experts signals have been used in previous works in the field of finance, as far as we know, it is the first time this method, in tandem with deep RL, is used to solve the financial portfolio management problem. Our proposed framework consists of a convolutional network for aggregating signals, another convolutional network for historical price data, and a vanilla network. We used the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm as the agent to process the reward and take action in the environment. The results suggested that, on average, our framework could gain 90 percent of the profit earned by the best expert.

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques are generally concerned with the design of decision-making policies driven by the maximisation of the expected outcome. Nevertheless, this approach does not take into consideration the potential risk associated with the actions taken, which may be critical in certain applications. To address that issue, the present research work introduces a novel methodology based on distributional RL to derive sequential decision-making policies that are sensitive to the risk, the latter being modelled by the tail of the return probability distribution. The core idea is to replace the $Q$ function generally standing at the core of learning schemes in RL by another function taking into account both the expected return and the risk. Named the risk-based utility function $U$, it can be extracted from the random return distribution $Z$ naturally learnt by any distributional RL algorithm. This enables to span the complete potential trade-off between risk minimisation and expected return maximisation, in contrast to fully risk-averse methodologies. Fundamentally, this research yields a truly practical and accessible solution for learning risk-sensitive policies with minimal modification to the distributional RL algorithm, and with an emphasis on the interpretability of the resulting decision-making process.

Financial time series prediction, a growing research topic, has attracted considerable interest from scholars, and several approaches have been developed. Among them, decomposition-based methods have achieved promising results. Most decomposition-based methods approximate a single function, which is insufficient for obtaining accurate results. Moreover, most existing researches have concentrated on one-step-ahead forecasting that prevents stock market investors from arriving at the best decisions for the future. This study proposes two novel methods for multi-step-ahead stock price prediction based on the issues outlined. DCT-MFRFNN, a method based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) and multi-functional recurrent fuzzy neural network (MFRFNN), uses DCT to reduce fluctuations in the time series and simplify its structure and MFRFNN to predict the stock price. VMD-MFRFNN, an approach based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and MFRFNN, brings together their advantages. VMD-MFRFNN consists of two phases. The input signal is decomposed to several IMFs using VMD in the decomposition phase. In the prediction and reconstruction phase, each of the IMFs is given to a separate MFRFNN for prediction, and predicted signals are summed to reconstruct the output. Three financial time series, including Hang Seng Index (HSI), Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), and Standard & Poor's 500 Index (SPX), are used for the evaluation of the proposed methods. Experimental results indicate that VMD-MFRFNN surpasses other state-of-the-art methods. VMD-MFRFNN, on average, shows 35.93%, 24.88%, and 34.59% decreases in RMSE from the second-best model for HSI, SSE, and SPX, respectively. Also, DCT-MFRFNN outperforms MFRFNN in all experiments.

We study different aspects of active learning with deep neural networks in a consistent and unified way. i) We investigate incremental and cumulative training modes which specify how the newly labeled data are used for training. ii) We study active learning w.r.t. the model configurations such as the number of epochs and neurons as well as the choice of batch size. iii) We consider in detail the behavior of query strategies and their corresponding informativeness measures and accordingly propose more efficient querying procedures. iv) We perform statistical analyses, e.g., on actively learned classes and test error estimation, that reveal several insights about active learning. v) We investigate how active learning with neural networks can benefit from pseudo-labels as proxies for actual labels.

We investigate the use of Minimax distances to extract in a nonparametric way the features that capture the unknown underlying patterns and structures in the data. We develop a general-purpose and computationally efficient framework to employ Minimax distances with many machine learning methods that perform on numerical data. We study both computing the pairwise Minimax distances for all pairs of objects and as well as computing the Minimax distances of all the objects to/from a fixed (test) object. We first efficiently compute the pairwise Minimax distances between the objects, using the equivalence of Minimax distances over a graph and over a minimum spanning tree constructed on that. Then, we perform an embedding of the pairwise Minimax distances into a new vector space, such that their squared Euclidean distances in the new space equal to the pairwise Minimax distances in the original space. We also study the case of having multiple pairwise Minimax matrices, instead of a single one. Thereby, we propose an embedding via first summing up the centered matrices and then performing an eigenvalue decomposition to obtain the relevant features. In the following, we study computing Minimax distances from a fixed (test) object which can be used for instance in K-nearest neighbor search. Similar to the case of all-pair pairwise Minimax distances, we develop an efficient and general-purpose algorithm that is applicable with any arbitrary base distance measure. Moreover, we investigate in detail the edges selected by the Minimax distances and thereby explore the ability of Minimax distances in detecting outlier objects. Finally, for each setting, we perform several experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Explainable AI transforms opaque decision strategies of ML models into explanations that are interpretable by the user, for example, identifying the contribution of each input feature to the prediction at hand. Such explanations, however, entangle the potentially multiple factors that enter into the overall complex decision strategy. We propose to disentangle explanations by finding relevant subspaces in activation space that can be mapped to more abstract human-understandable concepts and enable a joint attribution on concepts and input features. To automatically extract the desired representation, we propose new subspace analysis formulations that extend the principle of PCA and subspace analysis to explanations. These novel analyses, which we call principal relevant component analysis (PRCA) and disentangled relevant subspace analysis (DRSA), optimize relevance of projected activations rather than the more traditional variance or kurtosis. This enables a much stronger focus on subspaces that are truly relevant for the prediction and the explanation, in particular, ignoring activations or concepts to which the prediction model is invariant. Our approach is general enough to work alongside common attribution techniques such as Shapley Value, Integrated Gradients, or LRP. Our proposed methods show to be practically useful and compare favorably to the state of the art as demonstrated on benchmarks and three use cases.

In recent years distributional reinforcement learning has produced many state of the art results. Increasingly sample efficient Distributional algorithms for the discrete action domain have been developed over time that vary primarily in the way they parameterize their approximations of value distributions, and how they quantify the differences between those distributions. In this work we transfer three of the most well-known and successful of those algorithms (QR-DQN, IQN and FQF) to the continuous action domain by extending two powerful actor-critic algorithms (TD3 and SAC) with distributional critics. We investigate whether the relative performance of the methods for the discrete action space translates to the continuous case. To that end we compare them empirically on the pybullet implementations of a set of continuous control tasks. Our results indicate qualitative invariance regarding the number and placement of distributional atoms in the deterministic, continuous action setting.

The behaviors of deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously resistant to human interpretations. In this paper, we propose Hypergradient Data Relevance Analysis, or HYDRA, which interprets the predictions made by DNNs as effects of their training data. Existing approaches generally estimate data contributions around the final model parameters and ignore how the training data shape the optimization trajectory. By unrolling the hypergradient of test loss w.r.t. the weights of training data, HYDRA assesses the contribution of training data toward test data points throughout the training trajectory. In order to accelerate computation, we remove the Hessian from the calculation and prove that, under moderate conditions, the approximation error is bounded. Corroborating this theoretical claim, empirical results indicate the error is indeed small. In addition, we quantitatively demonstrate that HYDRA outperforms influence functions in accurately estimating data contribution and detecting noisy data labels. The source code is available at https://github.com/cyyever/aaai_hydra_8686.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mobility enables flexible and customized federated learning (FL) at the network edge. However, the underlying uncertainties in the aerial-terrestrial wireless channel may lead to a biased FL model. In particular, the distribution of the global model and the aggregation of the local updates within the FL learning rounds at the UAVs are governed by the reliability of the wireless channel. This creates an undesirable bias towards the training data of ground devices with better channel conditions, and vice versa. This paper characterizes the global bias problem of aerial FL in large-scale UAV networks. To this end, the paper proposes a channel-aware distribution and aggregation scheme to enforce equal contribution from all devices in the FL training as a means to resolve the global bias problem. We demonstrate the convergence of the proposed method by experimenting with the MNIST dataset and show its superiority compared to existing methods. The obtained results enable system parameter tuning to relieve the impact of the aerial channel deficiency on the FL convergence rate.

Assessing the quality of movements for post-stroke patients during the rehabilitation phase is vital given that there is no standard stroke rehabilitation plan for all the patients. In fact, it depends basically on the patient's functional independence and its progress along the rehabilitation sessions. To tackle this challenge and make neurorehabilitation more agile, we propose an automatic assessment pipeline that starts by recognizing patients' movements by means of a shallow deep learning architecture, then measuring the movement quality using jerk measure and related measures. A particularity of this work is that the dataset used is clinically relevant, since it represents movements inspired from Fugl-Meyer a well common upper-limb clinical stroke assessment scale for stroke patients. We show that it is possible to detect the contrast between healthy and patients movements in terms of smoothness, besides achieving conclusions about the patients' progress during the rehabilitation sessions that correspond to the clinicians' findings about each case.

The increasingly widespread adoption of large language models has highlighted the need for improving their explainability. We present context length probing, a novel explanation technique for causal language models, based on tracking the predictions of a model as a function of the length of available context, and allowing to assign differential importance scores to different contexts. The technique is model-agnostic and does not rely on access to model internals beyond computing token-level probabilities. We apply context length probing to large pre-trained language models and offer some initial analyses and insights, including the potential for studying long-range dependencies. The source code and a demo of the method are available.

Detecting abrupt changes in data distribution is one of the most significant tasks in streaming data analysis. Although many unsupervised Change-Point Detection (CPD) methods have been proposed recently to identify those changes, they still suffer from missing subtle changes, poor scalability, or/and sensitive to noise points. To meet these challenges, we are the first to generalise the CPD problem as a special case of the Change-Interval Detection (CID) problem. Then we propose a CID method, named iCID, based on a recent Isolation Distributional Kernel (IDK). iCID identifies the change interval if there is a high dissimilarity score between two non-homogeneous temporal adjacent intervals. The data-dependent property and finite feature map of IDK enabled iCID to efficiently identify various types of change points in data streams with the tolerance of noise points. Moreover, the proposed online and offline versions of iCID have the ability to optimise key parameter settings. The effectiveness and efficiency of iCID have been systematically verified on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

We consider a semi-supervised $k$-clustering problem where information is available on whether pairs of objects are in the same or in different clusters. This information is either available with certainty or with a limited level of confidence. We introduce the PCCC algorithm, which iteratively assigns objects to clusters while accounting for the information provided on the pairs of objects. Our algorithm can include relationships as hard constraints that are guaranteed to be satisfied or as soft constraints that can be violated subject to a penalty. This flexibility distinguishes our algorithm from the state-of-the-art in which all pairwise constraints are either considered hard, or all are considered soft. Unlike existing algorithms, our algorithm scales to large-scale instances with up to 60,000 objects, 100 clusters, and millions of cannot-link constraints (which are the most challenging constraints to incorporate). We compare the PCCC algorithm with state-of-the-art approaches in an extensive computational study. Even though the PCCC algorithm is more general than the state-of-the-art approaches in its applicability, it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on instances with all hard constraints or all soft constraints both in terms of running time and various metrics of solution quality. The source code of the PCCC algorithm is publicly available on GitHub.

The literature on machine learning in the context of data streams is vast and growing. However, many of the defining assumptions regarding data-stream learning tasks are too strong to hold in practice, or are even contradictory such that they cannot be met in the contexts of supervised learning. Algorithms are chosen and designed based on criteria which are often not clearly stated, for problem settings not clearly defined, tested in unrealistic settings, and/or in isolation from related approaches in the wider literature. This puts into question the potential for real-world impact of many approaches conceived in such contexts, and risks propagating a misguided research focus. We propose to tackle these issues by reformulating the fundamental definitions and settings of supervised data-stream learning with regard to contemporary considerations of concept drift and temporal dependence; and we take a fresh look at what constitutes a supervised data-stream learning task, and a reconsideration of algorithms that may be applied to tackle such tasks. Through and in reflection of this formulation and overview, helped by an informal survey of industrial players dealing with real-world data streams, we provide recommendations. Our main emphasis is that learning from data streams does not impose a single-pass or online-learning approach, or any particular learning regime; and any constraints on memory and time are not specific to streaming. Meanwhile, there exist established techniques for dealing with temporal dependence and concept drift, in other areas of the literature. For the data streams community, we thus encourage a shift in research focus, from dealing with often-artificial constraints and assumptions on the learning mode, to issues such as robustness, privacy, and interpretability which are increasingly relevant to learning in data streams in academic and industrial settings.

Technology advancements in wireless communications and high-performance Extended Reality (XR) have empowered the developments of the Metaverse. The demand for Metaverse applications and hence, real-time digital twinning of real-world scenes is increasing. Nevertheless, the replication of 2D physical world images into 3D virtual world scenes is computationally intensive and requires computation offloading. The disparity in transmitted scene dimension (2D as opposed to 3D) leads to asymmetric data sizes in uplink (UL) and downlink (DL). To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we consider an asynchronous joint UL-DL scenario where in the UL stage, the smaller data size of the physical world scenes captured by multiple extended reality users (XUs) will be uploaded to the Metaverse Console (MC) to be construed and rendered. In the DL stage, the larger-size 3D virtual world scenes need to be transmitted back to the XUs. The decisions pertaining to computation offloading and channel assignment are optimized in the UL stage, and the MC will optimize power allocation for users assigned with a channel in the UL transmission stage. Some problems arise therefrom: (i) interactive multi-process chain, specifically Asynchronous Markov Decision Process (AMDP), (ii) joint optimization in multiple processes, and (iii) high-dimensional objective functions, or hybrid reward scenarios. To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we design a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm structure, namely Asynchronous Actors Hybrid Critic (AAHC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to proposed baselines, AAHC obtains better solutions with preferable training time.

Training a very deep neural network is a challenging task, as the deeper a neural network is, the more non-linear it is. We compare the performances of various preconditioned Langevin algorithms with their non-Langevin counterparts for the training of neural networks of increasing depth. For shallow neural networks, Langevin algorithms do not lead to any improvement, however the deeper the network is and the greater are the gains provided by Langevin algorithms. Adding noise to the gradient descent allows to escape from local traps, which are more frequent for very deep neural networks. Following this heuristic we introduce a new Langevin algorithm called Layer Langevin, which consists in adding Langevin noise only to the weights associated to the deepest layers. We then prove the benefits of Langevin and Layer Langevin algorithms for the training of popular deep residual architectures for image classification.

Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is not the gradient of any objective function, little else is known about its convergence behavior or properties. In this paper, we show that if the discounted approximation is followed such that the discount factor is increased slowly at a rate related to a decreasing learning rate, the resulting method recovers the standard guarantees of gradient ascent on the undiscounted objective.

The main objective of Prognostics and Health Management is to estimate the Remaining Useful Lifetime (RUL), namely, the time that a system or a piece of equipment is still in working order before starting to function incorrectly. In recent years, numerous machine learning algorithms have been proposed for RUL estimation, mainly focusing on providing more accurate RUL predictions. However, there are many sources of uncertainty in the problem, such as inherent randomness of systems failure, lack of knowledge regarding their future states, and inaccuracy of the underlying predictive models, making it infeasible to predict the RULs precisely. Hence, it is of utmost importance to quantify the uncertainty alongside the RUL predictions. In this work, we investigate the conformal prediction (CP) framework that represents uncertainty by predicting sets of possible values for the target variable (intervals in the case of RUL) instead of making point predictions. Under very mild technical assumptions, CP formally guarantees that the actual value (true RUL) is covered by the predicted set with a degree of certainty that can be prespecified. We study three CP algorithms to conformalize any single-point RUL predictor and turn it into a valid interval predictor. Finally, we conformalize two single-point RUL predictors, deep convolutional neural networks and gradient boosting, and illustrate their performance on the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) data sets.

Recently the deep learning has shown its advantage in representation learning and clustering for time series data. Despite the considerable progress, the existing deep time series clustering approaches mostly seek to train the deep neural network by some instance reconstruction based or cluster distribution based objective, which, however, lack the ability to exploit the sample-wise (or augmentation-wise) contrastive information or even the higher-level (e.g., cluster-level) contrastiveness for learning discriminative and clustering-friendly representations. In light of this, this paper presents a deep temporal contrastive clustering (DTCC) approach, which for the first time, to our knowledge, incorporates the contrastive learning paradigm into the deep time series clustering research. Specifically, with two parallel views generated from the original time series and their augmentations, we utilize two identical auto-encoders to learn the corresponding representations, and in the meantime perform the cluster distribution learning by incorporating a k-means objective. Further, two levels of contrastive learning are simultaneously enforced to capture the instance-level and cluster-level contrastive information, respectively. With the reconstruction loss of the auto-encoder, the cluster distribution loss, and the two levels of contrastive losses jointly optimized, the network architecture is trained in a self-supervised manner and the clustering result can thereby be obtained. Experiments on a variety of time series datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DTCC approach over the state-of-the-art.

Explainability is a vibrant research topic in the artificial intelligence community, with growing interest across methods and domains. Much has been written about the topic, yet explainability still lacks shared terminology and a framework capable of providing structural soundness to explanations. In our work, we address these issues by proposing a novel definition of explanation that is a synthesis of what can be found in the literature. We recognize that explanations are not atomic but the product of evidence stemming from the model and its input-output and the human interpretation of this evidence. Furthermore, we fit explanations into the properties of faithfulness (i.e., the explanation being a true description of the model's decision-making) and plausibility (i.e., how much the explanation looks convincing to the user). Using our proposed theoretical framework simplifies how these properties are ope rationalized and provide new insight into common explanation methods that we analyze as case studies.

Can we build continuous generative models which generalize across scales, can be evaluated at any coordinate, admit calculation of exact derivatives, and are conceptually simple? Existing MLP-based architectures generate worse samples than the grid-based generators with favorable convolutional inductive biases. Models that focus on generating images at different scales do better, but employ complex architectures not designed for continuous evaluation of images and derivatives. We take a signal-processing perspective and treat continuous image generation as interpolation from samples. Indeed, correctly sampled discrete images contain all information about the low spatial frequencies. The question is then how to extrapolate the spectrum in a data-driven way while meeting the above design criteria. Our answer is FunkNN -- a new convolutional network which learns how to reconstruct continuous images at arbitrary coordinates and can be applied to any image dataset. Combined with a discrete generative model it becomes a functional generator which can act as a prior in continuous ill-posed inverse problems. We show that FunkNN generates high-quality continuous images and exhibits strong out-of-distribution performance thanks to its patch-based design. We further showcase its performance in several stylized inverse problems with exact spatial derivatives.

Although most reinforcement learning research has centered on competitive games, little work has been done on applying it to co-operative multiplayer games or text-based games. Codenames is a board game that involves both asymmetric co-operation and natural language processing, which makes it an excellent candidate for advancing RL research. To my knowledge, this work is the first to formulate Codenames as a Markov Decision Process and apply some well-known reinforcement learning algorithms such as SAC, PPO, and A2C to the environment. Although none of the above algorithms converge for the Codenames environment, neither do they converge for a simplified environment called ClickPixel, except when the board size is small.

Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work focuses on the former. Previous methods build the network with several modules like CNN, LSTM and Attention. Recent methods combine the Transformer with these modules for better performance. However, it requires tedious optimization skills to train a network composed of mixed modules, making these methods inconvenient to be used in practice. In this paper, we propose to design \emph{pure Transformer-based networks} for deep RL, aiming at providing off-the-shelf backbones for both the online and offline settings. Specifically, the Transformer in Transformer (TIT) backbone is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the inner one is used to process a single observation, while the outer one is responsible for processing the observation history; combining both is expected to extract spatial-temporal representations for good decision-making. Experiments show that TIT can achieve satisfactory performance in different settings, consistently.

A universal kernel is constructed whose sections approximate any causal and time-invariant filter in the fading memory category with inputs and outputs in a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. This kernel is built using the reservoir functional associated with a state-space representation of the Volterra series expansion available for any analytic fading memory filter. It is hence called the Volterra reservoir kernel. Even though the state-space representation and the corresponding reservoir feature map are defined on an infinite-dimensional tensor algebra space, the kernel map is characterized by explicit recursions that are readily computable for specific data sets when employed in estimation problems using the representer theorem. We showcase the performance of the Volterra reservoir kernel in a popular data science application in relation to bitcoin price prediction.

Panoptic segmentation assigns semantic and instance ID labels to every pixel of an image. As permutations of instance IDs are also valid solutions, the task requires learning of high-dimensional one-to-many mapping. As a result, state-of-the-art approaches use customized architectures and task-specific loss functions. We formulate panoptic segmentation as a discrete data generation problem, without relying on inductive bias of the task. A diffusion model based on analog bits is used to model panoptic masks, with a simple, generic architecture and loss function. By simply adding past predictions as a conditioning signal, our method is capable of modeling video (in a streaming setting) and thereby learns to track object instances automatically. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our generalist approach can perform competitively to state-of-the-art specialist methods in similar settings.

Mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions can be used to cluster data on the unit hypersphere. This is particularly adapted for high-dimensional directional data such as texts. We propose in this article to estimate a von Mises mixture using a l 1 penalized likelihood. This leads to sparse prototypes that improve clustering interpretability. We introduce an expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm for this estimation and explore the trade-off between the sparsity term and the likelihood one with a path following algorithm. The model's behaviour is studied on simulated data and, we show the advantages of the approach on real data benchmark. We also introduce a new data set on financial reports and exhibit the benefits of our method for exploratory analysis.

Learning policies from fixed offline datasets is a key challenge to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms towards practical applications. This is often because off-policy RL algorithms suffer from distributional shift, due to mismatch between dataset and the target policy, leading to high variance and over-estimation of value functions. In this work, we propose variance regularization for offline RL algorithms, using stationary distribution corrections. We show that by using Fenchel duality, we can avoid double sampling issues for computing the gradient of the variance regularizer. The proposed algorithm for offline variance regularization (OVAR) can be used to augment any existing offline policy optimization algorithms. We show that the regularizer leads to a lower bound to the offline policy optimization objective, which can help avoid over-estimation errors, and explains the benefits of our approach across a range of continuous control domains when compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

This article concerns Bayesian inference using deep linear networks with output dimension one. In the interpolating (zero noise) regime we show that with Gaussian weight priors and MSE negative log-likelihood loss both the predictive posterior and the Bayesian model evidence can be written in closed form in terms of a class of meromorphic special functions called Meijer-G functions. These results are non-asymptotic and hold for any training dataset, network depth, and hidden layer widths, giving exact solutions to Bayesian interpolation using a deep Gaussian process with a Euclidean covariance at each layer. Through novel asymptotic expansions of Meijer-G functions, a rich new picture of the role of depth emerges. Specifically, we find: ${\bf \text{The role of depth in extrapolation}}$: The posteriors in deep linear networks with data-independent priors are the same as in shallow networks with evidence maximizing data-dependent priors. In this sense, deep linear networks make provably optimal predictions. ${\bf \text{The role of depth in model selection}}$: Starting from data-agnostic priors, Bayesian model evidence in wide networks is only maximized at infinite depth. This gives a principled reason to prefer deeper networks (at least in the linear case). ${\bf \text{Scaling laws relating depth, width, and number of datapoints}}$: With data-agnostic priors, a novel notion of effective depth given by \[\#\text{hidden layers}\times\frac{\#\text{training data}}{\text{network width}}\] determines the Bayesian posterior in wide linear networks, giving rigorous new scaling laws for generalization error.

Nowadays, feature selection is frequently used in machine learning when there is a risk of performance degradation due to overfitting or when computational resources are limited. During the feature selection process, the subset of features that are most relevant and least redundant is chosen. In recent years, it has become clear that, in addition to relevance and redundancy, features' complementarity must be considered. Informally, if the features are weak predictors of the target variable separately and strong predictors when combined, then they are complementary. It is demonstrated in this paper that the synergistic effect of complementary features mutually amplifying each other in the construction of two-tier decision trees can be interfered with by another feature, resulting in a decrease in performance. It is demonstrated using cross-validation on both synthetic and real datasets, regression and classification, that removing or eliminating the interfering feature can improve performance by up to 24 times. It has also been discovered that the lesser the domain is learned, the greater the increase in performance. More formally, it is demonstrated that there is a statistically significant negative rank correlation between performance on the dataset prior to the elimination of the interfering feature and performance growth after the elimination of the interfering feature. It is concluded that this broadens the scope of feature selection methods for cases where data and computational resources are sufficient.

Audio DeepFakes are artificially generated utterances created using deep learning methods with the main aim to fool the listeners, most of such audio is highly convincing. Their quality is sufficient to pose a serious threat in terms of security and privacy, such as the reliability of news or defamation. To prevent the threats, multiple neural networks-based methods to detect generated speech have been proposed. In this work, we cover the topic of adversarial attacks, which decrease the performance of detectors by adding superficial (difficult to spot by a human) changes to input data. Our contribution contains evaluating the robustness of 3 detection architectures against adversarial attacks in two scenarios (white-box and using transferability mechanism) and enhancing it later by the use of adversarial training performed by our novel adaptive training method.

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $\theta_i,\theta_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare to technology industries. Most of the work in existing literature is focused on evaluating the mean outcome of a given policy, and ignores the variability of the outcome. However, in a variety of applications, criteria other than the mean may be more sensible. For example, when the reward distribution is skewed and asymmetric, quantile-based metrics are often preferred for their robustness. In this paper, we propose a doubly-robust inference procedure for quantile OPE in sequential decision making and study its asymptotic properties. In particular, we propose utilizing state-of-the-art deep conditional generative learning methods to handle parameter-dependent nuisance function estimation. We demonstrate the advantages of this proposed estimator through both simulations and a real-world dataset from a short-video platform. In particular, we find that our proposed estimator outperforms classical OPE estimators for the mean in settings with heavy-tailed reward distributions.

This paper deals with the problem of statistical and system heterogeneity in a cross-silo Federated Learning (FL) framework where there exist a limited number of Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) devices in a smart building. We propose a novel Graph Signal Processing (GSP)-inspired aggregation rule based on graph filtering dubbed ``G-Fedfilt''. The proposed aggregator enables a structured flow of information based on the graph's topology. This behavior allows capturing the interconnection of CIoT devices and training domain-specific models. The embedded graph filter is equipped with a tunable parameter which enables a continuous trade-off between domain-agnostic and domain-specific FL. In the case of domain-agnostic, it forces G-Fedfilt to act similar to the conventional Federated Averaging (FedAvg) aggregation rule. The proposed G-Fedfilt also enables an intrinsic smooth clustering based on the graph connectivity without explicitly specified which further boosts the personalization of the models in the framework. In addition, the proposed scheme enjoys a communication-efficient time-scheduling to alleviate the system heterogeneity. This is accomplished by adaptively adjusting the amount of training data samples and sparsity of the models' gradients to reduce communication desynchronization and latency. Simulation results show that the proposed G-Fedfilt achieves up to $3.99\% $ better classification accuracy than the conventional FedAvg when concerning model personalization on the statistically heterogeneous local datasets, while it is capable of yielding up to $2.41\%$ higher accuracy than FedAvg in the case of testing the generalization of the models.

Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in "AI?" In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5's ranking of responses is also highly-correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

Function approximation has enabled remarkable advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) techniques in environments with high-dimensional inputs, such as images, in an end-to-end fashion, mapping such inputs directly to low-level control. Nevertheless, these have proved vulnerable to small adversarial input perturbations. A number of approaches for improving or certifying robustness of end-to-end RL to adversarial perturbations have emerged as a result, focusing on cumulative reward. However, what is often at stake in adversarial scenarios is the violation of fundamental properties, such as safety, rather than the overall reward that combines safety with efficiency. Moreover, properties such as safety can only be defined with respect to true state, rather than the high-dimensional raw inputs to end-to-end policies. To disentangle nominal efficiency and adversarial safety, we situate RL in deterministic partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with the goal of maximizing cumulative reward subject to safety constraints. We then propose a partially-supervised reinforcement learning (PSRL) framework that takes advantage of an additional assumption that the true state of the POMDP is known at training time. We present the first approach for certifying safety of PSRL policies under adversarial input perturbations, and two adversarial training approaches that make direct use of PSRL. Our experiments demonstrate both the efficacy of the proposed approach for certifying safety in adversarial environments, and the value of the PSRL framework coupled with adversarial training in improving certified safety while preserving high nominal reward and high-quality predictions of true state.

Determining and predicting reservoir formation properties for newly drilled wells represents a significant challenge. One of the variations of these properties evaluation is well-interval similarity. Many methodologies for similarity learning exist: from rule-based approaches to deep neural networks. Recently, articles adopted, e.g. recurrent neural networks to build a similarity model as we deal with sequential data. Such an approach suffers from short-term memory, as it pays more attention to the end of a sequence. Neural network with Transformer architecture instead cast their attention over all sequences to make a decision. To make them more efficient in terms of computational time, we introduce a limited attention mechanism similar to Informer and Performer architectures. We conduct experiments on open datasets with more than 20 wells making our experiments reliable and suitable for industrial usage. The best results were obtained with our adaptation of the Informer variant of Transformer with ROC AUC 0.982. It outperforms classical approaches with ROC AUC 0.824, Recurrent neural networks with ROC AUC 0.934 and straightforward usage of Transformers with ROC AUC 0.961.

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Given various notions of fairness defined in the literature, investigating the correlation and interaction among metrics is vital for addressing unfairness. Practitioners and data scientists should be able to comprehend each metric and examine their impact on one another given the context, use case, and regulations. Exploring the combinatorial space of different metrics for such examination is burdensome. To alleviate the burden of selecting fairness notions for consideration, we propose a framework that estimates the correlation among fairness notions. Our framework consequently identifies a set of diverse and semantically distinct metrics as representative for a given context. We propose a Monte-Carlo sampling technique for computing the correlations between fairness metrics by indirect and efficient perturbation in the model space. Using the estimated correlations, we then find a subset of representative metrics. The paper proposes a generic method that can be generalized to any arbitrary set of fairness metrics. We showcase the validity of the proposal using comprehensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets.

The Annals of Joseon Dynasty (AJD) contain the daily records of the Kings of Joseon, the 500-year kingdom preceding the modern nation of Korea. The Annals were originally written in an archaic Korean writing system, `Hanja', and were translated into Korean from 1968 to 1993. The resulting translation was however too literal and contained many archaic Korean words; thus, a new expert translation effort began in 2012. Since then, the records of only one king have been completed in a decade. In parallel, expert translators are working on English translation, also at a slow pace and produced only one king's records in English so far. Thus, we propose H2KE, a neural machine translation model, that translates historical documents in Hanja to more easily understandable Korean and to English. Built on top of multilingual neural machine translation, H2KE learns to translate a historical document written in Hanja, from both a full dataset of outdated Korean translation and a small dataset of more recently translated contemporary Korean and English. We compare our method against two baselines: a recent model that simultaneously learns to restore and translate Hanja historical document and a Transformer based model trained only on newly translated corpora. The experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU scores for both contemporary Korean and English translations. We further conduct extensive human evaluation which shows that our translation is preferred over the original expert translations by both experts and non-expert Korean speakers.

Accurate uncertainty quantification is a major challenge in deep learning, as neural networks can make overconfident errors and assign high confidence predictions to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. The most popular approaches to estimate predictive uncertainty in deep learning are methods that combine predictions from multiple neural networks, such as Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and deep ensembles. However their practicality in real-time, industrial-scale applications are limited due to the high memory and computational cost. Furthermore, ensembles and BNNs do not necessarily fix all the issues with the underlying member networks. In this work, we study principled approaches to improve uncertainty property of a single network, based on a single, deterministic representation. By formalizing the uncertainty quantification as a minimax learning problem, we first identify distance awareness, i.e., the model's ability to quantify the distance of a testing example from the training data, as a necessary condition for a DNN to achieve high-quality (i.e., minimax optimal) uncertainty estimation. We then propose Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Process (SNGP), a simple method that improves the distance-awareness ability of modern DNNs with two simple changes: (1) applying spectral normalization to hidden weights to enforce bi-Lipschitz smoothness in representations and (2) replacing the last output layer with a Gaussian process layer. On a suite of vision and language understanding benchmarks, SNGP outperforms other single-model approaches in prediction, calibration and out-of-domain detection. Furthermore, SNGP provides complementary benefits to popular techniques such as deep ensembles and data augmentation, making it a simple and scalable building block for probabilistic deep learning. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/google/uncertainty-baselines

Efficient custom pooling techniques that can aggressively trim the dimensions of a feature map and thereby reduce inference compute and memory footprint for resource-constrained computer vision applications have recently gained significant traction. However, prior pooling works extract only the local context of the activation maps, limiting their effectiveness. In contrast, we propose a novel non-local self-attentive pooling method that can be used as a drop-in replacement to the standard pooling layers, such as max/average pooling or strided convolution. The proposed self-attention module uses patch embedding, multi-head self-attention, and spatial-channel restoration, followed by sigmoid activation and exponential soft-max. This self-attention mechanism efficiently aggregates dependencies between non-local activation patches during down-sampling. Extensive experiments on standard object classification and detection tasks with various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures demonstrate the superiority of our proposed mechanism over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pooling techniques. In particular, we surpass the test accuracy of existing pooling techniques on different variants of MobileNet-V2 on ImageNet by an average of 1.2%. With the aggressive down-sampling of the activation maps in the initial layers (providing up to 22x reduction in memory consumption), our approach achieves 1.43% higher test accuracy compared to SOTA techniques with iso-memory footprints. This enables the deployment of our models in memory-constrained devices, such as micro-controllers (without losing significant accuracy), because the initial activation maps consume a significant amount of on-chip memory for high-resolution images required for complex vision tasks. Our proposed pooling method also leverages the idea of channel pruning to further reduce memory footprints.

Graph machine learning has been extensively studied in both academia and industry. Although booming with a vast number of emerging methods and techniques, most of the literature is built on the in-distribution hypothesis, i.e., testing and training graph data are identically distributed. However, this in-distribution hypothesis can hardly be satisfied in many real-world graph scenarios where the model performance substantially degrades when there exist distribution shifts between testing and training graph data. To solve this critical problem, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on graphs, which goes beyond the in-distribution hypothesis, has made great progress and attracted ever-increasing attention from the research community. In this paper, we comprehensively survey OOD generalization on graphs and present a detailed review of recent advances in this area. First, we provide a formal problem definition of OOD generalization on graphs. Second, we categorize existing methods into three classes from conceptually different perspectives, i.e., data, model, and learning strategy, based on their positions in the graph machine learning pipeline, followed by detailed discussions for each category. We also review the theories related to OOD generalization on graphs and introduce the commonly used graph datasets for thorough evaluations. Finally, we share our insights on future research directions. This paper is the first systematic and comprehensive review of OOD generalization on graphs, to the best of our knowledge.

Deep-learning (DL) compilers such as TVM and TensorRT are increasingly being used to optimize deep neural network (DNN) models to meet performance, resource utilization and other requirements. Bugs in these compilers can result in models whose semantics differ from the original ones, producing incorrect results that corrupt the correctness of downstream applications. However, finding bugs in these compilers is challenging due to their complexity. In this work, we propose a new fuzz testing approach for finding bugs in deep-learning compilers. Our core approach consists of (i) generating diverse yet valid DNN test models that can exercise a large part of the compiler's transformation logic using light-weight operator specifications; (ii) performing gradient-based search to find model inputs that avoid any floating-point exceptional values during model execution, reducing the chance of missed bugs or false alarms; and (iii) using differential testing to identify bugs. We implemented this approach in NNSmith which has found 72 new bugs for TVM, TensorRT, ONNXRuntime, and PyTorch to date. Of these 58 have been confirmed and 51 have been fixed by their respective project maintainers.

In training neural networks, batch normalization has many benefits, not all of them entirely understood. But it also has some drawbacks. Foremost is arguably memory consumption, as computing the batch statistics requires all instances within the batch to be processed simultaneously, whereas without batch normalization it would be possible to process them one by one while accumulating the weight gradients. Another drawback is that that distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation) are unlike all other model parameters in that they are not trained using gradient descent but require special treatment, complicating implementation. In this paper, I show a simple and straightforward way to address these issues. The idea, in short, is to add terms to the loss that, for each activation, cause the minimization of the negative log likelihood of a Gaussian distribution that is used to normalize the activation. Among other benefits, this will hopefully contribute to the democratization of AI research by means of lowering the hardware requirements for training larger models.

We are interested in understanding the underlying generation process for long sequences of symbolic events. To do so, we propose COSSU, an algorithm to mine small and meaningful sets of sequential rules. The rules are selected using an MDL-inspired criterion that favors compactness and relies on a novel rule-based encoding scheme for sequences. Our evaluation shows that COSSU can successfully retrieve relevant sets of closed sequential rules from a long sequence. Such rules constitute an interpretable model that exhibits competitive accuracy for the tasks of next-element prediction and classification.

We study episodic two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) in the offline setting, where the goal is to find an approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) policy pair based on a dataset collected a priori. When the dataset does not have uniform coverage over all policy pairs, finding an approximate NE involves challenges in three aspects: (i) distributional shift between the behavior policy and the optimal policy, (ii) function approximation to handle large state space, and (iii) minimax optimization for equilibrium solving. We propose a pessimism-based algorithm, dubbed as pessimistic minimax value iteration (PMVI), which overcomes the distributional shift by constructing pessimistic estimates of the value functions for both players and outputs a policy pair by solving NEs based on the two value functions. Furthermore, we establish a data-dependent upper bound on the suboptimality which recovers a sublinear rate without the assumption on uniform coverage of the dataset. We also prove an information-theoretical lower bound, which suggests that the data-dependent term in the upper bound is intrinsic. Our theoretical results also highlight a notion of "relative uncertainty", which characterizes the necessary and sufficient condition for achieving sample efficiency in offline MGs. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first nearly minimax optimal result for offline MGs with function approximation.

Node classification is a fundamental graph-based task that aims to predict the classes of unlabeled nodes, for which Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the state-of-the-art methods. Current GNNs assume that nodes in the training set contribute equally during training. However, the quality of training nodes varies greatly, and the performance of GNNs could be harmed by two types of low-quality training nodes: (1) inter-class nodes situated near class boundaries that lack the typical characteristics of their corresponding classes. Because GNNs are data-driven approaches, training on these nodes could degrade the accuracy. (2) mislabeled nodes. In real-world graphs, nodes are often mislabeled, which can significantly degrade the robustness of GNNs. To mitigate the detrimental effect of the low-quality training nodes, we present CLNode, which employs a selective training strategy to train GNN based on the quality of nodes. Specifically, we first design a multi-perspective difficulty measurer to accurately measure the quality of training nodes. Then, based on the measured qualities, we employ a training scheduler that selects appropriate training nodes to train GNN in each epoch. To evaluate the effectiveness of CLNode, we conduct extensive experiments by incorporating it in six representative backbone GNNs. Experimental results on real-world networks demonstrate that CLNode is a general framework that can be combined with various GNNs to improve their accuracy and robustness.

The utility of machine learning in evaluating the creditworthiness of loan applicants has been proofed since decades ago. However, automatic decisions may lead to different treatments over groups or individuals, potentially causing discrimination. This paper benchmarks 12 top bias mitigation methods discussing their performance based on 5 different fairness metrics, accuracy achieved, and potential profits for the financial institutions. Our findings show the difficulties in achieving fairness while preserving accuracy and profits. Additionally, it highlights some of the best and worst performers and helps bridging the gap between experimental machine learning and its industrial application.

Adversarial training instances can severely distort a model's behavior. This work investigates certified regression defenses, which provide guaranteed limits on how much a regressor's prediction may change under a poisoning attack. Our key insight is that certified regression reduces to voting-based certified classification when using median as a model's primary decision function. Coupling our reduction with existing certified classifiers, we propose six new regressors provably-robust to poisoning attacks. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first work that certifies the robustness of individual regression predictions without any assumptions about the data distribution and model architecture. We also show that the assumptions made by existing state-of-the-art certified classifiers are often overly pessimistic. We introduce a tighter analysis of model robustness, which in many cases results in significantly improved certified guarantees. Lastly, we empirically demonstrate our approaches' effectiveness on both regression and classification data, where the accuracy of up to 50% of test predictions can be guaranteed under 1% training set corruption and up to 30% of predictions under 4% corruption. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ZaydH/certified-regression.

Recent empirical studies on domain generalization (DG) have shown that DG algorithms that perform well on some distribution shifts fail on others, and no state-of-the-art DG algorithm performs consistently well on all shifts. Moreover, real-world data often has multiple distribution shifts over different attributes; hence we introduce multi-attribute distribution shift datasets and find that the accuracy of existing DG algorithms falls even further. To explain these results, we provide a formal characterization of generalization under multi-attribute shifts using a canonical causal graph. Based on the relationship between spurious attributes and the classification label, we obtain realizations of the canonical causal graph that characterize common distribution shifts and show that each shift entails different independence constraints over observed variables. As a result, we prove that any algorithm based on a single, fixed constraint cannot work well across all shifts, providing theoretical evidence for mixed empirical results on DG algorithms. Based on this insight, we develop Causally Adaptive Constraint Minimization (CACM), an algorithm that uses knowledge about the data-generating process to adaptively identify and apply the correct independence constraints for regularization. Results on fully synthetic, MNIST, small NORB, and Waterbirds datasets, covering binary and multi-valued attributes and labels, show that adaptive dataset-dependent constraints lead to the highest accuracy on unseen domains whereas incorrect constraints fail to do so. Our results demonstrate the importance of modeling the causal relationships inherent in the data-generating process.

Recent progress in deep learning (DL)-based joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) has led to a new paradigm of semantic communications. Two salient features of DeepJSCC-based semantic communications are the exploitation of semantic-aware features directly from the source signal, and the discrete-time analog transmission (DTAT) of these features. Compared with traditional digital communications, semantic communications with DeepJSCC provide superior reconstruction performance at the receiver and graceful degradation with diminishing channel quality, but also exhibit a large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in the transmitted signal. An open question has been whether the gains of DeepJSCC come from the additional freedom brought by the high-PAPR continuous-amplitude signal. In this paper, we address this question by exploring three PAPR reduction techniques in the application of image transmission. We confirm that the superior image reconstruction performance of DeepJSCC-based semantic communications can be retained while the transmitted PAPR is suppressed to an acceptable level. This observation is an important step towards the implementation of DeepJSCC in practical semantic communication systems.

The success of deep learning is due in large part to our ability to solve certain massive non-convex optimization problems with relative ease. Though non-convex optimization is NP-hard, simple algorithms -- often variants of stochastic gradient descent -- exhibit surprising effectiveness in fitting large neural networks in practice. We argue that neural network loss landscapes contain (nearly) a single basin after accounting for all possible permutation symmetries of hidden units a la Entezari et al. (2021). We introduce three algorithms to permute the units of one model to bring them into alignment with a reference model in order to merge the two models in weight space. This transformation produces a functionally equivalent set of weights that lie in an approximately convex basin near the reference model. Experimentally, we demonstrate the single basin phenomenon across a variety of model architectures and datasets, including the first (to our knowledge) demonstration of zero-barrier linear mode connectivity between independently trained ResNet models on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Additionally, we investigate intriguing phenomena relating model width and training time to mode connectivity. Finally, we discuss shortcomings of the linear mode connectivity hypothesis, including a counterexample to the single basin theory.

In recent years operator networks have emerged as promising deep learning tools for approximating the solution to partial differential equations (PDEs). These networks map input functions that describe material properties, forcing functions and boundary data to the solution of a PDE. This work describes a new architecture for operator networks that mimics the form of the numerical solution obtained from an approximate variational or weak formulation of the problem. The application of these ideas to a generic elliptic PDE leads to a variationally mimetic operator network (VarMiON). Like the conventional Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) the VarMiON is also composed of a sub-network that constructs the basis functions for the output and another that constructs the coefficients for these basis functions. However, in contrast to the DeepONet, the architecture of these sub-networks in the VarMiON is precisely determined. An analysis of the error in the VarMiON solution reveals that it contains contributions from the error in the training data, the training error, the quadrature error in sampling input and output functions, and a "covering error" that measures the distance between the test input functions and the nearest functions in the training dataset. It also depends on the stability constants for the exact solution operator and its VarMiON approximation. The application of the VarMiON to a canonical elliptic PDE reveals that for approximately the same number of network parameters, on average the VarMiON incurs smaller errors than a standard DeepONet. Further, its performance is more robust to variations in input functions, the techniques used to sample the input and output functions, the techniques used to construct the basis functions, and the number of input functions.

In biomedical image analysis, the applicability of deep learning methods is directly impacted by the quantity of image data available. This is due to deep learning models requiring large image datasets to provide high-level performance. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely utilized to address data limitations through the generation of synthetic biomedical images. GANs consist of two models. The generator, a model that learns how to produce synthetic images based on the feedback it receives. The discriminator, a model that classifies an image as synthetic or real and provides feedback to the generator. Throughout the training process, a GAN can experience several technical challenges that impede the generation of suitable synthetic imagery. First, the mode collapse problem whereby the generator either produces an identical image or produces a uniform image from distinct input features. Second, the non-convergence problem whereby the gradient descent optimizer fails to reach a Nash equilibrium. Thirdly, the vanishing gradient problem whereby unstable training behavior occurs due to the discriminator achieving optimal classification performance resulting in no meaningful feedback being provided to the generator. These problems result in the production of synthetic imagery that is blurry, unrealistic, and less diverse. To date, there has been no survey article outlining the impact of these technical challenges in the context of the biomedical imagery domain. This work presents a review and taxonomy based on solutions to the training problems of GANs in the biomedical imaging domain. This survey highlights important challenges and outlines future research directions about the training of GANs in the domain of biomedical imagery.

The analysis of network structure is essential to many scientific areas, ranging from biology to sociology. As the computational task of clustering these networks into partitions, i.e., solving the community detection problem, is generally NP-hard, heuristic solutions are indispensable. The exploration of expedient heuristics has led to the development of particularly promising approaches in the emerging technology of quantum computing. Motivated by the substantial hardware demands for all established quantum community detection approaches, we introduce a novel QUBO based approach that only needs number-of-nodes many qubits and is represented by a QUBO-matrix as sparse as the input graph's adjacency matrix. The substantial improvement on the sparsity of the QUBO-matrix, which is typically very dense in related work, is achieved through the novel concept of separation-nodes. Instead of assigning every node to a community directly, this approach relies on the identification of a separation-node set, which -- upon its removal from the graph -- yields a set of connected components, representing the core components of the communities. Employing a greedy heuristic to assign the nodes from the separation-node sets to the identified community cores, subsequent experimental results yield a proof of concept. This work hence displays a promising approach to NISQ ready quantum community detection, catalyzing the application of quantum computers for the network structure analysis of large scale, real world problem instances.

This paper studies the problem of conducting self-supervised learning for node representation learning on graphs. Most existing self-supervised learning methods assume the graph is homophilous, where linked nodes often belong to the same class or have similar features. However, such assumptions of homophily do not always hold in real-world graphs. We address this problem by developing a decoupled self-supervised learning (DSSL) framework for graph neural networks. DSSL imitates a generative process of nodes and links from latent variable modeling of the semantic structure, which decouples different underlying semantics between different neighborhoods into the self-supervised learning process. Our DSSL framework is agnostic to the encoders and does not need prefabricated augmentations, thus is flexible to different graphs. To effectively optimize the framework, we derive the evidence lower bound of the self-supervised objective and develop a scalable training algorithm with variational inference. We provide a theoretical analysis to justify that DSSL enjoys the better downstream performance. Extensive experiments on various types of graph benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed framework can achieve better performance compared with competitive baselines.

We propose unsupervised representation learning and feature extraction from dendrograms. The commonly used Minimax distance measures correspond to building a dendrogram with single linkage criterion, with defining specific forms of a level function and a distance function over that. Therefore, we extend this method to arbitrary dendrograms. We develop a generalized framework wherein different distance measures and representations can be inferred from different types of dendrograms, level functions and distance functions. Via an appropriate embedding, we compute a vector-based representation of the inferred distances, in order to enable many numerical machine learning algorithms to employ such distances. Then, to address the model selection problem, we study the aggregation of different dendrogram-based distances respectively in solution space and in representation space in the spirit of deep representations. In the first approach, for example for the clustering problem, we build a graph with positive and negative edge weights according to the consistency of the clustering labels of different objects among different solutions, in the context of ensemble methods. Then, we use an efficient variant of correlation clustering to produce the final clusters. In the second approach, we investigate the combination of different distances and features sequentially in the spirit of multi-layered architectures to obtain the final features. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via several numerical studies.

Large, text-conditioned generative diffusion models have recently gained a lot of attention for their impressive performance in generating high-fidelity images from text alone. However, achieving high-quality results is almost unfeasible in a one-shot fashion. On the contrary, text-guided image generation involves the user making many slight changes to inputs in order to iteratively carve out the envisioned image. However, slight changes to the input prompt often lead to entirely different images being generated, and thus the control of the artist is limited in its granularity. To provide flexibility, we present the Stable Artist, an image editing approach enabling fine-grained control of the image generation process. The main component is semantic guidance (SEGA) which steers the diffusion process along variable numbers of semantic directions. This allows for subtle edits to images, changes in composition and style, as well as optimization of the overall artistic conception. Furthermore, SEGA enables probing of latent spaces to gain insights into the representation of concepts learned by the model, even complex ones such as 'carbon emission'. We demonstrate the Stable Artist on several tasks, showcasing high-quality image editing and composition.

We consider fixed-budget best-arm identification in two-armed Gaussian bandit problems. One of the longstanding open questions is the existence of an optimal strategy under which the probability of misidentification matches a lower bound. We show that a strategy following the Neyman allocation rule (Neyman, 1934) is asymptotically optimal when the gap between the expected rewards is small. First, we review a lower bound derived by Kaufmann et al. (2016). Then, we propose the "Neyman Allocation (NA)-Augmented Inverse Probability weighting (AIPW)" strategy, which consists of the sampling rule using the Neyman allocation with an estimated standard deviation and the recommendation rule using an AIPW estimator. Our proposed strategy is optimal because the upper bound matches the lower bound when the budget goes to infinity and the gap goes to zero.

Deep active learning aims to reduce the annotation cost for the training of deep models, which is notoriously data-hungry. Until recently, deep active learning methods were ineffectual in the low-budget regime, where only a small number of examples are annotated. The situation has been alleviated by recent advances in representation and self-supervised learning, which impart the geometry of the data representation with rich information about the points. Taking advantage of this progress, we study the problem of subset selection for annotation through a "covering" lens, proposing ProbCover - a new active learning algorithm for the low budget regime, which seeks to maximize Probability Coverage. We then describe a dual way to view the proposed formulation, from which one can derive strategies suitable for the high budget regime of active learning, related to existing methods like Coreset. We conclude with extensive experiments, evaluating ProbCover in the low-budget regime. We show that our principled active learning strategy improves the state-of-the-art in the low-budget regime in several image recognition benchmarks. This method is especially beneficial in the semi-supervised setting, allowing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to match the performance of fully supervised methods, while using much fewer labels nonetheless. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.

Several clustering methods (e.g., Normalized Cut and Ratio Cut) divide the Min Cut cost function by a cluster dependent factor (e.g., the size or the degree of the clusters), in order to yield a more balanced partitioning. We, instead, investigate adding such regularizations to the original cost function. We first consider the case where the regularization term is the sum of the squared size of the clusters, and then generalize it to adaptive regularization of the pairwise similarities. This leads to shifting (adaptively) the pairwise similarities which might make some of them negative. We then study the connection of this method to Correlation Clustering and then propose an efficient local search optimization algorithm with fast theoretical convergence rate to solve the new clustering problem. In the following, we investigate the shift of pairwise similarities on some common clustering methods, and finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of the method by extensive experiments on different datasets.

This study focuses on multi-step spatio-temporal wind speed forecasting for the Norwegian continental shelf. The study aims to leverage spatial dependencies through the relative physical location of different measurement stations to improve local wind forecasts. Our multi-step forecasting models produce either 10-minute, 1- or 4-hour forecasts, with 10-minute resolution, meaning that the models produce more informative time series for predicted future trends. A graph neural network (GNN) architecture was used to extract spatial dependencies, with different update functions to learn temporal correlations. These update functions were implemented using different neural network architectures. One such architecture, the Transformer, has become increasingly popular for sequence modelling in recent years. Various alterations have been proposed to better facilitate time series forecasting, of which this study focused on the Informer, LogSparse Transformer and Autoformer. This is the first time the LogSparse Transformer and Autoformer have been applied to wind forecasting and the first time any of these or the Informer have been formulated in a spatio-temporal setting for wind forecasting. By comparing against spatio-temporal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models, the study showed that the models using the altered Transformer architectures as update functions in GNNs were able to outperform these. Furthermore, we propose the Fast Fourier Transformer (FFTransformer), which is a novel Transformer architecture based on signal decomposition and consists of two separate streams that analyse the trend and periodic components separately. The FFTransformer and Autoformer were found to achieve superior results for the 10-minute and 1-hour ahead forecasts, with the FFTransformer significantly outperforming all other models for the 4-hour ahead forecasts.

Policy makers need to predict the progression of an outcome before adopting a new treatment policy, which defines when and how a sequence of treatments affecting the outcome occurs in continuous time. Commonly, algorithms that predict interventional future outcome trajectories take a fixed sequence of future treatments as input. This either neglects the dependence of future treatments on outcomes preceding them or implicitly assumes the treatment policy is known, and hence excludes scenarios where the policy is unknown or a counterfactual analysis is needed. To handle these limitations, we develop a joint model for treatments and outcomes, which allows for the estimation of treatment policies and effects from sequential treatment--outcome data. It can answer interventional and counterfactual queries about interventions on treatment policies, as we show with real-world data on blood glucose progression and a simulation study building on top of this.

A multitude of studies have been conducted on graph drawing, but many existing methods only focus on optimizing a single aesthetic aspect of graph layouts. There are a few existing methods that attempt to develop a flexible solution for optimizing different aesthetic aspects measured by different aesthetic criteria. Furthermore, thanks to the significant advance in deep learning techniques, several deep learning-based layout methods were proposed recently, which have demonstrated the advantages of the deep learning approaches for graph drawing. However, none of these existing methods can be directly applied to optimizing non-differentiable criteria without special accommodation. In this work, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based deep learning framework for graph drawing, called SmartGD, which can optimize any quantitative aesthetic goals even though they are non-differentiable. In the cases where the aesthetic goal is too abstract to be described mathematically, SmartGD can draw graphs in a similar style as a collection of good layout examples, which might be selected by humans based on the abstract aesthetic goal. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SmartGD, we conduct experiments on minimizing stress, minimizing edge crossing, maximizing crossing angle, and a combination of multiple aesthetics. Compared with several popular graph drawing algorithms, the experimental results show that SmartGD achieves good performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

In my previous article I mentioned for the first time that a classical neural network may have quantum properties as its own structure may be entangled. The question one may ask now is whether such a quantum property can be used to entangle other systems? The answer should be yes, as shown in what follows.

Explaining machine learning models is an important and increasingly popular area of research interest. The Shapley value from game theory has been proposed as a prime approach to compute feature importance towards model predictions on images, text, tabular data, and recently graph neural networks (GNNs) on graphs. In this work, we revisit the appropriateness of the Shapley value for GNN explanation, where the task is to identify the most important subgraph and constituent nodes for GNN predictions. We claim that the Shapley value is a non-ideal choice for graph data because it is by definition not structure-aware. We propose a Graph Structure-aware eXplanation (GStarX) method to leverage the critical graph structure information to improve the explanation. Specifically, we define a scoring function based on a new structure-aware value from the cooperative game theory proposed by Hamiache and Navarro (HN). When used to score node importance, the HN value utilizes graph structures to attribute cooperation surplus between neighbor nodes, resembling message passing in GNNs, so that node importance scores reflect not only the node feature importance, but also the node structural roles. We demonstrate that GStarX produces qualitatively more intuitive explanations, and quantitatively improves explanation fidelity over strong baselines on chemical graph property prediction and text graph sentiment classification.

Multi-view unsupervised feature selection has been proven to be efficient in reducing the dimensionality of multi-view unlabeled data with high dimensions. The previous methods assume all of the views are complete. However, in real applications, the multi-view data are often incomplete, i.e., some views of instances are missing, which will result in the failure of these methods. Besides, while the data arrive in form of streams, these existing methods will suffer the issues of high storage cost and expensive computation time. To address these issues, we propose an Incremental Incomplete Multi-view Unsupervised Feature Selection method (I$^2$MUFS) on incomplete multi-view streaming data. By jointly considering the consistent and complementary information across different views, I$^2$MUFS embeds the unsupervised feature selection into an extended weighted non-negative matrix factorization model, which can learn a consensus clustering indicator matrix and fuse different latent feature matrices with adaptive view weights. Furthermore, we introduce the incremental leaning mechanisms to develop an alternative iterative algorithm, where the feature selection matrix is incrementally updated, rather than recomputing on the entire updated data from scratch. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in terms of the clustering metrics and the computational cost.

Decision-making strategy for autonomous vehicles de-scribes a sequence of driving maneuvers to achieve a certain navigational mission. This paper utilizes the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method to address the continuous-horizon decision-making problem on the highway. First, the vehicle kinematics and driving scenario on the freeway are introduced. The running objective of the ego automated vehicle is to execute an efficient and smooth policy without collision. Then, the particular algorithm named proximal policy optimization (PPO)-enhanced DRL is illustrated. To overcome the challenges in tardy training efficiency and sample inefficiency, this applied algorithm could realize high learning efficiency and excellent control performance. Finally, the PPO-DRL-based decision-making strategy is estimated from multiple perspectives, including the optimality, learning efficiency, and adaptability. Its potential for online application is discussed by applying it to similar driving scenarios.

The need for efficient computational screening of molecular candidates that possess desired properties frequently arises in various scientific and engineering problems, including drug discovery and materials design. However, the large size of the search space containing the candidates and the substantial computational cost of high-fidelity property prediction models makes screening practically challenging. In this work, we propose a general framework for constructing and optimizing a virtual screening (HTVS) pipeline that consists of multi-fidelity models. The central idea is to optimally allocate the computational resources to models with varying costs and accuracy to optimize the return-on-computational-investment (ROCI). Based on both simulated as well as real data, we demonstrate that the proposed optimal HTVS framework can significantly accelerate screening virtually without any degradation in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, it enables an adaptive operational strategy for HTVS, where one can trade accuracy for efficiency.

Understanding our brain is one of the most daunting tasks, one we cannot expect to complete without the use of technology. MindBigData aims to provide a comprehensive and updated dataset of brain signals related to a diverse set of human activities so it can inspire the use of machine learning algorithms as a benchmark of 'decoding' performance from raw brain activities into its corresponding (labels) mental (or physical) tasks. Using commercial of the self, EEG devices or custom ones built by us to explore the limits of the technology. We describe the data collection procedures for each of the sub datasets and with every headset used to capture them. Also, we report possible applications in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces or BCI that could impact the life of billions, in almost every sector like healthcare game changing use cases, industry or entertainment to name a few, at the end why not directly using our brains to 'disintermediate' senses, as the final HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) device? simply what we call the journey from Type to Touch to Talk to Think.

We propose a simple data model inspired from natural data such as text or images, and use it to study the importance of learning features in order to achieve good generalization. Our data model follows a long-tailed distribution in the sense that some rare subcategories have few representatives in the training set. In this context we provide evidence that a learner succeeds if and only if it identifies the correct features, and moreover derive non-asymptotic generalization error bounds that precisely quantify the penalty that one must pay for not learning features.

Most works on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) report a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g. from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach, and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy-to-plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.

Internet censorship is a phenomenon of societal importance and attracts investigation from multiple disciplines. Several research groups, such as Censored Planet, have deployed large scale Internet measurement platforms to collect network reachability data. However, existing studies generally rely on manually designed rules (i.e., using censorship fingerprints) to detect network-based Internet censorship from the data. While this rule-based approach yields a high true positive detection rate, it suffers from several challenges: it requires human expertise, is laborious, and cannot detect any censorship not captured by the rules. Seeking to overcome these challenges, we design and evaluate a classification model based on latent feature representation learning and an image-based classification model to detect network-based Internet censorship. To infer latent feature representations fromnetwork reachability data, we propose a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to capture the structure and the order of data elements in the data. To estimate the probability of censorship events from the inferred latent features, we rely on a densely connected multi-layer neural network model. Our image-based classification model encodes a network reachability data record as a gray-scale image and classifies the image as censored or not using a dense convolutional neural network. We compare and evaluate both approaches using data sets from Censored Planet via a hold-out evaluation. Both classification models are capable of detecting network-based Internet censorship as we were able to identify instances of censorship not detected by the known fingerprints. Latent feature representations likely encode more nuances in the data since the latent feature learning approach discovers a greater quantity, and a more diverse set, of new censorship instances.

Unlike traditional distributed machine learning, federated learning stores data locally for training and then aggregates the models on the server, which solves the data security problem that may arise in traditional distributed machine learning. However, during the training process, the transmission of model parameters can impose a significant load on the network bandwidth. It has been pointed out that the vast majority of model parameters are redundant during model parameter transmission. In this paper, we explore the data distribution law of selected partial model parameters on this basis, and propose a deep hierarchical quantization compression algorithm, which further compresses the model and reduces the network load brought by data transmission through the hierarchical quantization of model parameters. And we adopt a dynamic sampling strategy for the selection of clients to accelerate the convergence of the model. Experimental results on different public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Continual Learning (CL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that aims to learn from a continuous stream of tasks without forgetting knowledge learned from the previous tasks. To avoid performance decrease caused by forgetting, prior studies exploit episodic memory (EM), which stores a subset of the past observed samples while learning from new non-i.i.d. data. Despite the promising results, since CL is often assumed to execute on mobile or IoT devices, the EM size is bounded by the small hardware memory capacity and makes it infeasible to meet the accuracy requirements for real-world applications. Specifically, all prior CL methods discard samples overflowed from the EM and can never retrieve them back for subsequent training steps, incurring loss of information that would exacerbate catastrophic forgetting. We explore a novel hierarchical EM management strategy to address the forgetting issue. In particular, in mobile and IoT devices, real-time data can be stored not just in high-speed RAMs but in internal storage devices as well, which offer significantly larger capacity than the RAMs. Based on this insight, we propose to exploit the abundant storage to preserve past experiences and alleviate the forgetting by allowing CL to efficiently migrate samples between memory and storage without being interfered by the slow access speed of the storage. We call it Carousel Memory (CarM). As CarM is complementary to existing CL methods, we conduct extensive evaluations of our method with seven popular CL methods and show that CarM significantly improves the accuracy of the methods across different settings by large margins in final average accuracy (up to 28.4%) while retaining the same training efficiency.

Objective: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated promise in automated cardiac magnetic resonance image segmentation. However, when using CNNs in a large real-world dataset, it is important to quantify segmentation uncertainty and identify segmentations which could be problematic. In this work, we performed a systematic study of Bayesian and non-Bayesian methods for estimating uncertainty in segmentation neural networks. Methods: We evaluated Bayes by Backprop, Monte Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, and Stochastic Segmentation Networks in terms of segmentation accuracy, probability calibration, uncertainty on out-of-distribution images, and segmentation quality control. Results: We observed that Deep Ensembles outperformed the other methods except for images with heavy noise and blurring distortions. We showed that Bayes by Backprop is more robust to noise distortions while Stochastic Segmentation Networks are more resistant to blurring distortions. For segmentation quality control, we showed that segmentation uncertainty is correlated with segmentation accuracy for all the methods. With the incorporation of uncertainty estimates, we were able to reduce the percentage of poor segmentation to 5% by flagging 31--48% of the most uncertain segmentations for manual review, substantially lower than random review without using neural network uncertainty (reviewing 75--78% of all images). Conclusion: This work provides a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty estimation methods and showed that Deep Ensembles outperformed other methods in most cases. Significance: Neural network uncertainty measures can help identify potentially inaccurate segmentations and alert users for manual review.

The Government of Kerala had increased the frequency of supply of free food kits owing to the pandemic, however, these items were static and not indicative of the personal preferences of the consumers. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of various clustering techniques on a scaled-down version of a real-world dataset obtained through a conjoint analysis-based survey. Clustering carried out by centroid-based methods such as k means is analyzed and the results are plotted along with SVD, and finally, a conclusion is reached as to which among the two is better. Once the clusters have been formulated, commodities are also decided upon for each cluster. Also, clustering is further enhanced by reassignment, based on a specific cluster loss threshold. Thus, the most efficacious clustering technique for designing a food kit tailored to the needs of individuals is finally obtained.

Performance debugging in production is a fundamental activity in modern service-based systems. The diagnosis of performance issues is often time-consuming, since it requires thorough inspection of large volumes of traces and performance indices. In this paper we present DeLag, a novel automated search-based approach for diagnosing performance issues in service-based systems. DeLag identifies subsets of requests that show, in the combination of their Remote Procedure Call execution times, symptoms of potentially relevant performance issues. We call such symptoms Latency Degradation Patterns. DeLag simultaneously searches for multiple latency degradation patterns while optimizing precision, recall and latency dissimilarity. Experimentation on 700 datasets of requests generated from two microservice-based systems shows that our approach provides better and more stable effectiveness than three state-of-the-art approaches and general purpose machine learning clustering algorithms. DeLag is more effective than all baseline techniques in at least one case study (with p $\leq$ 0.05 and non-negligible effect size). Moreover, DeLag outperforms in terms of efficiency the second and the third most effective baseline techniques on the largest datasets used in our evaluation (up to 22%).

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a rigorous theory on how the attention mechanism achieves it. In particular, several intriguing questions remain open: (a) What makes a desirable representation? (b) How does the attention mechanism infer the desirable representation within the forward pass? (c) How does a pretraining procedure learn to infer the desirable representation through the backward pass? We observe that, as is the case in BERT and ViT, input tokens are often exchangeable since they already include positional encodings. The notion of exchangeability induces a latent variable model that is invariant to input sizes, which enables our theoretical analysis. - To answer (a) on representation, we establish the existence of a sufficient and minimal representation of input tokens. In particular, such a representation instantiates the posterior distribution of the latent variable given input tokens, which plays a central role in predicting output labels and solving downstream tasks. - To answer (b) on inference, we prove that attention with the desired parameter infers the latent posterior up to an approximation error, which is decreasing in input sizes. In detail, we quantify how attention approximates the conditional mean of the value given the key, which characterizes how it performs relational inference over long sequences. - To answer (c) on learning, we prove that both supervised and self-supervised objectives allow empirical risk minimization to learn the desired parameter up to a generalization error, which is independent of input sizes. Particularly, in the self-supervised setting, we identify a condition number that is pivotal to solving downstream tasks.

A new form of ML knowledge representation with high generalization power is developed and implemented numerically. Initial $\mathit{IN}$ attributes and $\mathit{OUT}$ class label are transformed into the corresponding Hilbert spaces by considering localized wavefunctions. A partially unitary operator optimally converting a state from $\mathit{IN}$ Hilbert space into $\mathit{OUT}$ Hilbert space is then built from an optimization problem of transferring maximal possible probability from $\mathit{IN}$ to $\mathit{OUT}$, this leads to the formulation of a new algebraic problem. Constructed Knowledge Generalizing Operator $\mathcal{U}$ can be considered as a $\mathit{IN}$ to $\mathit{OUT}$ quantum channel; it is a partially unitary rectangular matrix of the dimension $\mathrm{dim}(\mathit{OUT}) \times \mathrm{dim}(\mathit{IN})$ transforming operators as $A^{\mathit{OUT}}=\mathcal{U} A^{\mathit{IN}} \mathcal{U}^{\dagger}$. Whereas only operator $\mathcal{U}$ projections squared are observable $\left\langle\mathit{OUT}|\mathcal{U}|\mathit{IN}\right\rangle^2$ (probabilities), the fundamental equation is formulated for the operator $\mathcal{U}$ itself. This is the reason of high generalizing power of the approach; the situation is the same as for the Schr\"{o}dinger equation: we can only measure $\psi^2$, but the equation is written for $\psi$ itself.

As various city agencies and mobility operators navigate toward innovative mobility solutions, there is a need for strategic flexibility in well-timed investment decisions in the design and timing of mobility service regions, i.e. cast as "real options" (RO). This problem becomes increasingly challenging with multiple interacting RO in such investments. We propose a scalable machine learning based RO framework for multi-period sequential service region design & timing problem for mobility-on-demand services, framed as a Markov decision process with non-stationary stochastic variables. A value function approximation policy from literature uses multi-option least squares Monte Carlo simulation to get a policy value for a set of interdependent investment decisions as deferral options (CR policy). The goal is to determine the optimal selection and timing of a set of zones to include in a service region. However, prior work required explicit enumeration of all possible sequences of investments. To address the combinatorial complexity of such enumeration, we propose a new variant "deep" RO policy using an efficient recurrent neural network (RNN) based ML method (CR-RNN policy) to sample sequences to forego the need for enumeration, making network design & timing policy tractable for large scale implementation. Experiments on multiple service region scenarios in New York City (NYC) shows the proposed policy substantially reduces the overall computational cost (time reduction for RO evaluation of > 90% of total investment sequences is achieved), with zero to near-zero gap compared to the benchmark. A case study of sequential service region design for expansion of MoD services in Brooklyn, NYC show that using the CR-RNN policy to determine optimal RO investment strategy yields a similar performance (0.5% within CR policy value) with significantly reduced computation time (about 5.4 times faster).

With the fast development of big data, it has been easier than before to learn the optimal decision rule by updating the decision rule recursively and making online decisions. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual bandit framework of sequential decision-making. We propose a general framework for online and adaptive data collection environment that can update decision rules via weighted stochastic gradient descent. We allow different weighting schemes of the stochastic gradient and establish the asymptotic normality of the parameter estimator. Our proposed estimator significantly improves the asymptotic efficiency over the previous averaged SGD approach via inverse probability weights. We also conduct an optimality analysis on the weights in a linear regression setting. We provide a Bahadur representation of the proposed estimator and show that the remainder term in the Bahadur representation entails a slower convergence rate compared to classical SGD due to the adaptive data collection.

We develop and study new adversarial perturbations that enable an attacker to gain control over decisions in generic Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems including deep learning neural networks. In contrast to adversarial data modification, the attack mechanism we consider here involves alterations to the AI system itself. Such a stealth attack could be conducted by a mischievous, corrupt or disgruntled member of a software development team. It could also be made by those wishing to exploit a ``democratization of AI'' agenda, where network architectures and trained parameter sets are shared publicly. We develop a range of new implementable attack strategies with accompanying analysis, showing that with high probability a stealth attack can be made transparent, in the sense that system performance is unchanged on a fixed validation set which is unknown to the attacker, while evoking any desired output on a trigger input of interest. The attacker only needs to have estimates of the size of the validation set and the spread of the AI's relevant latent space. In the case of deep learning neural networks, we show that a one neuron attack is possible - a modification to the weights and bias associated with a single neuron - revealing a vulnerability arising from over-parameterization. We illustrate these concepts using state of the art architectures on two standard image data sets. Guided by the theory and computational results, we also propose strategies to guard against stealth attacks.

Trip destination prediction is an area of increasing importance in many applications such as trip planning, autonomous driving and electric vehicles. Even though this problem could be naturally addressed in an online learning paradigm where data is arriving in a sequential fashion, the majority of research has rather considered the offline setting. In this paper, we present a unified framework for trip destination prediction in an online setting, which is suitable for both online training and online prediction. For this purpose, we develop two clustering algorithms and integrate them within two online prediction models for this problem. We investigate the different configurations of clustering algorithms and prediction models on a real-world dataset. We demonstrate that both the clustering and the entire framework yield consistent results compared to the offline setting. Finally, we propose a novel regret metric for evaluating the entire online framework in comparison to its offline counterpart. This metric makes it possible to relate the source of erroneous predictions to either the clustering or the prediction model. Using this metric, we show that the proposed methods converge to a probability distribution resembling the true underlying distribution with a lower regret than all of the baselines.

This work targets designing a principled and unified training-free framework for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), with high performance, low cost, and in-depth interpretation. NAS has been explosively studied to automate the discovery of top-performer neural networks, but suffers from heavy resource consumption and often incurs search bias due to truncated training or approximations. Recent NAS works start to explore indicators that can predict a network's performance without training. However, they either leveraged limited properties of deep networks, or the benefits of their training-free indicators are not applied to more extensive search methods. By rigorous correlation analysis, we present a unified framework to understand and accelerate NAS, by disentangling "TEG" characteristics of searched networks - Trainability, Expressivity, Generalization - all assessed in a training-free manner. The TEG indicators could be scaled up and integrated with various NAS search methods, including both supernet and single-path approaches. Extensive studies validate the effective and efficient guidance from our TEG-NAS framework, leading to both improved search accuracy and over 56% reduction in search time cost. Moreover, we visualize search trajectories on three landscapes of "TEG" characteristics, observing that while a good local minimum is easier to find on NAS-Bench-201 given its simple topology, balancing "TEG" characteristics is much harder on the DARTS search space due to its complex landscape geometry. Our code is available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/TEGNAS.

This work is related to the implementation of a decision tree construction algorithm on a quantum simulator. Here we consider an algorithm based on a binary criterion. Also, we study the improvement capability with quantum heuristic QAOA. We implemented the classical and the quantum version of this algorithm to compare built trees.

Accurately predicting their future performance can ensure students successful graduation, and help them save both time and money. However, achieving such predictions faces two challenges, mainly due to the diversity of students' background and the necessity of continuously tracking their evolving progress. The goal of this work is to create a system able to automatically detect students in difficulty, for instance predicting if they are likely to fail a course. We compare a naive approach widely used in the literature, which uses attributes available in the data set (like the grades), with a personalized approach we called Personalized Student Attribute Inference (PSAI). With our model, we create personalized attributes to capture the specific background of each student. Both approaches are compared using machine learning algorithms like decision trees, support vector machine or neural networks.

In recent years, quantum machine learning has seen a substantial increase in the use of variational quantum circuits (VQCs). VQCs are inspired by artificial neural networks, which achieve extraordinary performance in a wide range of AI tasks as massively parameterized function approximators. VQCs have already demonstrated promising results, for example, in generalization and the requirement for fewer parameters to train, by utilizing the more robust algorithmic toolbox available in quantum computing. A VQCs' trainable parameters or weights are usually used as angles in rotational gates and current gradient-based training methods do not account for that. We introduce weight re-mapping for VQCs, to unambiguously map the weights to an interval of length $2\pi$, drawing inspiration from traditional ML, where data rescaling, or normalization techniques have demonstrated tremendous benefits in many circumstances. We employ a set of five functions and evaluate them on the Iris and Wine datasets using variational classifiers as an example. Our experiments show that weight re-mapping can improve convergence in all tested settings. Additionally, we were able to demonstrate that weight re-mapping increased test accuracy for the Wine dataset by $10\%$ over using unmodified weights.

The monitoring of machine conditions in a plant is crucial for production in manufacturing. A sudden failure of a machine can stop production and cause a loss of revenue. The vibration signal of a machine is a good indicator of its condition. This paper presents a dataset of vibration signals from a lab-scale machine. The dataset contains four different types of machine conditions: normal, unbalance, misalignment, and bearing fault. Three machine learning methods (SVM, KNN, and GNB) evaluated the dataset, and a perfect result was obtained by one of the methods on a 1-fold test. The performance of the algorithms is evaluated using weighted accuracy (WA) since the data is balanced. The results show that the best-performing algorithm is the SVM with a WA of 99.75\% on the 5-fold cross-validations. The dataset is provided in the form of CSV files in an open and free repository at https://zenodo.org/record/7006575.

In the last few years, various communication compression techniques have emerged as an indispensable tool helping to alleviate the communication bottleneck in distributed learning. However, despite the fact {\em biased} compressors often show superior performance in practice when compared to the much more studied and understood {\em unbiased} compressors, very little is known about them. In this work we study three classes of biased compression operators, two of which are new, and their performance when applied to (stochastic) gradient descent and distributed (stochastic) gradient descent. We show for the first time that biased compressors can lead to linear convergence rates both in the single node and distributed settings. We prove that distributed compressed SGD method, employed with error feedback mechanism, enjoys the ergodic rate $\mathcal{O}\left( \delta L \exp[-\frac{\mu K}{\delta L}] + \frac{(C + \delta D)}{K\mu}\right)$, where $\delta\ge1$ is a compression parameter which grows when more compression is applied, $L$ and $\mu$ are the smoothness and strong convexity constants, $C$ captures stochastic gradient noise ($C=0$ if full gradients are computed on each node) and $D$ captures the variance of the gradients at the optimum ($D=0$ for over-parameterized models). Further, via a theoretical study of several synthetic and empirical distributions of communicated gradients, we shed light on why and by how much biased compressors outperform their unbiased variants. Finally, we propose several new biased compressors with promising theoretical guarantees and practical performance.

This paper presents a cross-domain trend analysis that aims to identify and analyze the relationships between stock prices, stock news on Twitter, and users' behaviors on e-commerce websites. The analysis is based on three datasets: a US stock dataset, a stock tweets dataset, and an e-commerce behavior dataset. The analysis is performed using Hadoop, Hive, and Tableau, allowing for efficient and scalable processing and visualizing large datasets. The analysis includes trend analysis of Twitter sentiment (positive and negative tweets) and correlation analysis, including the correlation between tweet sentiment and stocks, the correlation between stock trends and shopping behavior, and the understanding of data based on different slices of time. By comparing different features from the datasets over time, we hope to gain insight into the factors that drive user behavior as well as the market in different categories. The results of this analysis can provide valuable insights for businesses and investors to inform decision-making. We believe that our analysis can serve as a valuable starting point for further research and investigation into these topics.

Detecting structures at the particle scale within plastically deformed crystalline materials allows a better understanding of the occurring phenomena. While previous approaches mostly relied on applying hand-chosen criteria on different local parameters, these approaches could only detect already known structures.We introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm to automatically detect structures within a crystal under plastic deformation. This approach is based on a study developed for structural detection on colloidal materials. This algorithm has the advantage of being computationally fast and easy to implement. We show that by using local parameters based on bond-angle distributions, we are able to detect more structures and with a higher degree of precision than traditional hand-made criteria.

Predicting video viewership is a top priority for content creators and video-sharing sites. Content creators live on such predictions to maximize influences and minimize budgets. Video-sharing sites rely on this prediction to promote credible videos and curb violative videos. Although deep learning champions viewership prediction, it lacks interpretability, which is fundamental to increasing the adoption of predictive models and prescribing measurements to improve viewership. Following the design-science paradigm, we propose a novel interpretable IT system, Precise Wide and Deep Learning (PrecWD), to precisely interpret viewership prediction. Improving upon state-of-the-art frameworks, PrecWD offers precise feature effects and designs an unstructured component. PrecWD outperforms benchmarks in two contexts: health video viewership prediction and misinformation viewership prediction. A user study confirms the superior interpretability of PrecWD. This study contributes to IS design theory with generalizable design principles and an interpretable predictive framework. Our findings provide implications to improve video viewership and credibility.

Pneumonia, a respiratory infection brought on by bacteria or viruses, affects a large number of people, especially in developing and impoverished countries where high levels of pollution, unclean living conditions, and overcrowding are frequently observed, along with insufficient medical infrastructure. Pleural effusion, a condition in which fluids fill the lung and complicate breathing, is brought on by pneumonia. Early detection of pneumonia is essential for ensuring curative care and boosting survival rates. The approach most usually used to diagnose pneumonia is chest X-ray imaging. The purpose of this work is to develop a method for the automatic diagnosis of bacterial and viral pneumonia in digital x-ray pictures. This article first presents the authors' technique, and then gives a comprehensive report on recent developments in the field of reliable diagnosis of pneumonia. In this study, here tuned a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network to classify plant diseases based on images and tested its performance. Deep learning architecture is compared empirically. VGG19, ResNet with 152v2, Resnext101, Seresnet152, Mobilenettv2, and DenseNet with 201 layers are among the architectures tested. Experiment data consists of two groups, sick and healthy X-ray pictures. To take appropriate action against plant diseases as soon as possible, rapid disease identification models are preferred. DenseNet201 has shown no overfitting or performance degradation in our experiments, and its accuracy tends to increase as the number of epochs increases. Further, DenseNet201 achieves state-of-the-art performance with a significantly a smaller number of parameters and within a reasonable computing time. This architecture outperforms the competition in terms of testing accuracy, scoring 95%. Each architecture was trained using Keras, using Theano as the backend.

Finding and localizing the conceptual changes in two scenes in terms of the presence or removal of objects in two images belonging to the same scene at different times in special care applications is of great significance. This is mainly due to the fact that addition or removal of important objects for some environments can be harmful. As a result, there is a need to design a program that locates these differences using machine vision. The most important challenge of this problem is the change in lighting conditions and the presence of shadows in the scene. Therefore, the proposed methods must be resistant to these challenges. In this article, a method based on deep convolutional neural networks using transfer learning is introduced, which is trained with an intelligent data synthesis process. The results of this method are tested and presented on the dataset provided for this purpose. It is shown that the presented method is more efficient than other methods and can be used in a variety of real industrial environments.

Tumor-stroma ratio (TSR) is a prognostic factor for many types of solid tumors. In this study, we propose a method for automated estimation of TSR from histopathological images of colorectal cancer. The method is based on convolutional neural networks which were trained to classify colorectal cancer tissue in hematoxylin-eosin stained samples into three classes: stroma, tumor and other. The models were trained using a data set that consists of 1343 whole slide images. Three different training setups were applied with a transfer learning approach using domain-specific data i.e. an external colorectal cancer histopathological data set. The three most accurate models were chosen as a classifier, TSR values were predicted and the results were compared to a visual TSR estimation made by a pathologist. The results suggest that classification accuracy does not improve when domain-specific data are used in the pre-training of the convolutional neural network models in the task at hand. Classification accuracy for stroma, tumor and other reached 96.1$\%$ on an independent test set. Among the three classes the best model gained the highest accuracy (99.3$\%$) for class tumor. When TSR was predicted with the best model, the correlation between the predicted values and values estimated by an experienced pathologist was 0.57. Further research is needed to study associations between computationally predicted TSR values and other clinicopathological factors of colorectal cancer and the overall survival of the patients.

We propose a statistical procedure to characterize and extract features from a waveform that can be applied as a pre-processing signal stage in a pattern recognition task using Artificial Neural Networks. Such a procedure is based on measuring a 30-parameters set of moments and cumulants from the waveform, its derivative, and its integral. The technique is presented as an extension of the Statistical Signal Characterization method existing in the literature. As a testing methodology, we used the procedure to distinguish a pulse-like signal from different versions of itself with frequency spectrum alterations or deformations. The recognition task was performed by single feed-forward back-propagation networks trained for the case Sinc-, Gaussian-, and Chirp-pulse waveform. Because of the success obtained in these examples, we can conclude that the proposed extended statistical signal characterization method is an effective tool for pattern-recognition applications. In particular, we can use it as a fast pre-processing stage in embedded systems with limited memory or computational capability.

We developed a simulator to quantify the effect of exercise ordering on both student engagement and retention. Our approach combines the construction of neural network representations for users and exercises using a dynamic matrix factorization method. We further created a machine learning models of success and dropout prediction. As a result, our system is able to predict student engagement and retention based on a given sequence of exercises selected. This opens the door to the development of versatile reinforcement learning agents which can substitute the role of private tutoring in exam preparation.

Efficient surrogate modelling is a key requirement for uncertainty quantification in data-driven scenarios. In this work, a novel approach of using Sparse Random Features for surrogate modelling in combination with self-supervised dimensionality reduction is described. The method is compared to other methods on synthetic and real data obtained from crashworthiness analyses. The results show a superiority of the here described approach over state of the art surrogate modelling techniques, Polynomial Chaos Expansions and Neural Networks.

Generative AI has matured to a point where large-scale models can generate text that seems indistinguishable from human-written text and remarkably photorealistic images. Automatically measuring how close the distribution of generated data is to the target real data distribution is a key step in diagnosing existing models and developing better models. We present MAUVE, a family of comparison measures between pairs of distributions such as those encountered in the generative modeling of text or images. These scores are statistical summaries of divergence frontiers capturing two types of errors in generative modeling. We explore four approaches to statistically estimate these scores: vector quantization, non-parametric estimation, classifier-based estimation, and parametric Gaussian approximations. We provide statistical bounds for the vector quantization approach. Empirically, we find that the proposed scores paired with a range of $f$-divergences and statistical estimation methods can quantify the gaps between the distributions of human-written text and those of modern neural language models by correlating with human judgments and identifying known properties of the generated texts. We conclude the paper by demonstrating its applications to other AI domains and discussing practical recommendations.

We explore the ability of overparameterized shallow neural networks to learn Lipschitz regression functions with and without label noise when trained by Gradient Descent (GD). To avoid the problem that in the presence of noisy labels, neural networks trained to nearly zero training error are inconsistent on this class, we propose an early stopping rule that allows us to show optimal rates. This provides an alternative to the result of Hu et al. (2021) who studied the performance of $\ell 2$ -regularized GD for training shallow networks in nonparametric regression which fully relied on the infinite-width network (Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)) approximation. Here we present a simpler analysis which is based on a partitioning argument of the input space (as in the case of 1-nearest-neighbor rule) coupled with the fact that trained neural networks are smooth with respect to their inputs when trained by GD. In the noise-free case the proof does not rely on any kernelization and can be regarded as a finite-width result. In the case of label noise, by slightly modifying the proof, the noise is controlled using a technique of Yao, Rosasco, and Caponnetto (2007).

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training can be difficult due to vanishing and exploding gradients during weight optimization through backpropagation. To address this problem, we propose a general class of Hamiltonian DNNs (H-DNNs) that stem from the discretization of continuous-time Hamiltonian systems and include several existing DNN architectures based on ordinary differential equations. Our main result is that a broad set of H-DNNs ensures non-vanishing gradients by design for an arbitrary network depth. This is obtained by proving that, using a semi-implicit Euler discretization scheme, the backward sensitivity matrices involved in gradient computations are symplectic. We also provide an upper-bound to the magnitude of sensitivity matrices and show that exploding gradients can be controlled through regularization. Finally, we enable distributed implementations of backward and forward propagation algorithms in H-DNNs by characterizing appropriate sparsity constraints on the weight matrices. The good performance of H-DNNs is demonstrated on benchmark classification problems, including image classification with the MNIST dataset.

There is a growing body of studies on applying deep learning to biometrics analysis. Certain circumstances, however, could impair the objective measures and accuracy of the proposed biometric data analysis methods. For instance, people with chronic pain (CP) unconsciously adapt specific body movements to protect themselves from injury or additional pain. Because there is no dedicated benchmark database to analyse this correlation, we considered one of the specific circumstances that potentially influence a person's biometrics during daily activities in this study and classified pain level and pain-related behaviour in the EmoPain database. To achieve this, we proposed a sparsely-connected recurrent neural networks (s-RNNs) ensemble with the gated recurrent unit (GRU) that incorporates multiple autoencoders using a shared training framework. This architecture is fed by multidimensional data collected from inertial measurement unit (IMU) and surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors. Furthermore, to compensate for variations in the temporal dimension that may not be perfectly represented in the latent space of s-RNNs, we fused hand-crafted features derived from information-theoretic approaches with represented features in the shared hidden state. We conducted several experiments which indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in classifying both pain level and pain-related behaviour.

Due to the environmental impacts caused by the construction industry, repurposing existing buildings and making them more energy-efficient has become a high-priority issue. However, a legitimate concern of land developers is associated with the buildings' state of conservation. For that reason, infrared thermography has been used as a powerful tool to characterize these buildings' state of conservation by detecting pathologies, such as cracks and humidity. Thermal cameras detect the radiation emitted by any material and translate it into temperature-color-coded images. Abnormal temperature changes may indicate the presence of pathologies, however, reading thermal images might not be quite simple. This research project aims to combine infrared thermography and machine learning (ML) to help stakeholders determine the viability of reusing existing buildings by identifying their pathologies and defects more efficiently and accurately. In this particular phase of this research project, we've used an image classification machine learning model of Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to differentiate three levels of cracks in one particular building. The model's accuracy was compared between the MSX and thermal images acquired from two distinct thermal cameras and fused images (formed through multisource information) to test the influence of the input data and network on the detection results.

Intensive algorithmic efforts have been made to enable the rapid improvements of certificated robustness for complex ML models recently. However, current robustness certification methods are only able to certify under a limited perturbation radius. Given that existing pure data-driven statistical approaches have reached a bottleneck, in this paper, we propose to integrate statistical ML models with knowledge (expressed as logical rules) as a reasoning component using Markov logic networks (MLN, so as to further improve the overall certified robustness. This opens new research questions about certifying the robustness of such a paradigm, especially the reasoning component (e.g., MLN). As the first step towards understanding these questions, we first prove that the computational complexity of certifying the robustness of MLN is #P-hard. Guided by this hardness result, we then derive the first certified robustness bound for MLN by carefully analyzing different model regimes. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five datasets including both high-dimensional images and natural language texts, and we show that the certified robustness with knowledge-based logical reasoning indeed significantly outperforms that of the state-of-the-arts.

In this paper we derive a PAC-Bayesian-Like error bound for a class of stochastic dynamical systems with inputs, namely, for linear time-invariant stochastic state-space models (stochastic LTI systems for short). This class of systems is widely used in control engineering and econometrics, in particular, they represent a special case of recurrent neural networks. In this paper we 1) formalize the learning problem for stochastic LTI systems with inputs, 2) derive a PAC-Bayesian-Like error bound for such systems, 3) discuss various consequences of this error bound.

Attention mechanisms form a core component of several successful deep learning architectures, and are based on one key idea: ''The output depends only on a small (but unknown) segment of the input.'' In several practical applications like image captioning and language translation, this is mostly true. In trained models with an attention mechanism, the outputs of an intermediate module that encodes the segment of input responsible for the output is often used as a way to peek into the `reasoning` of the network. We make such a notion more precise for a variant of the classification problem that we term selective dependence classification (SDC) when used with attention model architectures. Under such a setting, we demonstrate various error modes where an attention model can be accurate but fail to be interpretable, and show that such models do occur as a result of training. We illustrate various situations that can accentuate and mitigate this behaviour. Finally, we use our objective definition of interpretability for SDC tasks to evaluate a few attention model learning algorithms designed to encourage sparsity and demonstrate that these algorithms help improve interpretability.

The release of ChatGPT, a language model capable of generating text that appears human-like and authentic, has gained significant attention beyond the research community. We expect that the convincing performance of ChatGPT incentivizes users to apply it to a variety of downstream tasks, including prompting the model to simplify their own medical reports. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory case study. In a questionnaire, we asked 15 radiologists to assess the quality of radiology reports simplified by ChatGPT. Most radiologists agreed that the simplified reports were factually correct, complete, and not potentially harmful to the patient. Nevertheless, instances of incorrect statements, missed key medical findings, and potentially harmful passages were reported. While further studies are needed, the initial insights of this study indicate a great potential in using large language models like ChatGPT to improve patient-centered care in radiology and other medical domains.

This paper concerns the study of optimal (supremum and infimum) uncertainty bounds for systems where the input (or prior) probability measure is only partially/imperfectly known (e.g., with only statistical moments and/or on a coarse topology) rather than fully specified. Such partial knowledge provides constraints on the input probability measures. The theory of Optimal Uncertainty Quantification allows us to convert the task into a constraint optimization problem where one seeks to compute the least upper/greatest lower bound of the system's output uncertainties by finding the extremal probability measure of the input. Such optimization requires repeated evaluation of the system's performance indicator (input to performance map) and is high-dimensional and non-convex by nature. Therefore, it is difficult to find the optimal uncertainty bounds in practice. In this paper, we examine the use of machine learning, especially deep neural networks, to address the challenge. We achieve this by introducing a neural network classifier to approximate the performance indicator combined with the stochastic gradient descent method to solve the optimization problem. We demonstrate the learning based framework on the uncertainty quantification of the impact of magnesium alloys, which are promising light-weight structural and protective materials. Finally, we show that the approach can be used to construct maps for the performance certificate and safety design in engineering practice.

Boosting is a celebrated machine learning approach which is based on the idea of combining weak and moderately inaccurate hypotheses to a strong and accurate one. We study boosting under the assumption that the weak hypotheses belong to a class of bounded capacity. This assumption is inspired by the common convention that weak hypotheses are "rules-of-thumbs" from an "easy-to-learn class". (Schapire and Freund~'12, Shalev-Shwartz and Ben-David '14.) Formally, we assume the class of weak hypotheses has a bounded VC dimension. We focus on two main questions: (i) Oracle Complexity: How many weak hypotheses are needed to produce an accurate hypothesis? We design a novel boosting algorithm and demonstrate that it circumvents a classical lower bound by Freund and Schapire ('95, '12). Whereas the lower bound shows that $\Omega({1}/{\gamma^2})$ weak hypotheses with $\gamma$-margin are sometimes necessary, our new method requires only $\tilde{O}({1}/{\gamma})$ weak hypothesis, provided that they belong to a class of bounded VC dimension. Unlike previous boosting algorithms which aggregate the weak hypotheses by majority votes, the new boosting algorithm uses more complex ("deeper") aggregation rules. We complement this result by showing that complex aggregation rules are in fact necessary to circumvent the aforementioned lower bound. (ii) Expressivity: Which tasks can be learned by boosting weak hypotheses from a bounded VC class? Can complex concepts that are "far away" from the class be learned? Towards answering the first question we {introduce combinatorial-geometric parameters which capture expressivity in boosting.} As a corollary we provide an affirmative answer to the second question for well-studied classes, including half-spaces and decision stumps. Along the way, we establish and exploit connections with Discrepancy Theory.

The advances in Artificial Intelligence are creating new opportunities to improve lives of people around the world, from business to healthcare, from lifestyle to education. For example, some systems profile the users using their demographic and behavioral characteristics to make certain domain-specific predictions. Often, such predictions impact the life of the user directly or indirectly (e.g., loan disbursement, determining insurance coverage, shortlisting applications, etc.). As a result, the concerns over such AI-enabled systems are also increasing. To address these concerns, such systems are mandated to be responsible i.e., transparent, fair, and explainable to developers and end-users. In this paper, we present ComplAI, a unique framework to enable, observe, analyze and quantify explainability, robustness, performance, fairness, and model behavior in drift scenarios, and to provide a single Trust Factor that evaluates different supervised Machine Learning models not just from their ability to make correct predictions but from overall responsibility perspective. The framework helps users to (a) connect their models and enable explanations, (b) assess and visualize different aspects of the model, such as robustness, drift susceptibility, and fairness, and (c) compare different models (from different model families or obtained through different hyperparameter settings) from an overall perspective thereby facilitating actionable recourse for improvement of the models. It is model agnostic and works with different supervised machine learning scenarios (i.e., Binary Classification, Multi-class Classification, and Regression) and frameworks. It can be seamlessly integrated with any ML life-cycle framework. Thus, this already deployed framework aims to unify critical aspects of Responsible AI systems for regulating the development process of such real systems.

This paper proposes a new regularization algorithm referred to as macro-block dropout. The overfitting issue has been a difficult problem in training large neural network models. The dropout technique has proven to be simple yet very effective for regularization by preventing complex co-adaptations during training. In our work, we define a macro-block that contains a large number of units from the input to a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Rather than applying dropout to each unit, we apply random dropout to each macro-block. This algorithm has the effect of applying different drop out rates for each layer even if we keep a constant average dropout rate, which has better regularization effects. In our experiments using Recurrent Neural Network-Transducer (RNN-T), this algorithm shows relatively 4.30 % and 6.13 % Word Error Rates (WERs) improvement over the conventional dropout on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other. With an Attention-based Encoder-Decoder (AED) model, this algorithm shows relatively 4.36 % and 5.85 % WERs improvement over the conventional dropout on the same test sets.

In this paper, we present a framework for learning quadruped navigation by integrating central pattern generators (CPGs), i.e. systems of coupled oscillators, into the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Through both exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensing, the agent learns to modulate the intrinsic oscillator setpoints (amplitude and frequency) and coordinate rhythmic behavior among different oscillators to track velocity commands while avoiding collisions with the environment. We compare different neural network architectures (i.e. memory-free and memory-enabled) which learn implicit interoscillator couplings, as well as varying the strength of the explicit coupling weights in the oscillator dynamics equations. We train our policies in simulation and perform a sim-to-real transfer to the Unitree Go1 quadruped, where we observe robust navigation in a variety of scenarios. Our results show that both memory-enabled policy representations and explicit interoscillator couplings are beneficial for a successful sim-to-real transfer for navigation tasks. Video results can be found at https://youtu.be/O_LX1oLZOe0.

A recent trend in deep learning research features the application of graph neural networks for mesh-based continuum mechanics simulations. Most of these frameworks operate on graphs in which each edge connects two nodes. Inspired by the data connectivity in the finite element method, we connect the nodes by elements rather than edges, effectively forming a hypergraph. We implement a message-passing network on such a node-element hypergraph and explore the capability of the network for the modeling of fluid flow. The network is tested on two common benchmark problems, namely the fluid flow around a circular cylinder and airfoil configurations. The results show that such a message-passing network defined on the node-element hypergraph is able to generate more stable and accurate temporal roll-out predictions compared to the baseline generalized message-passing network defined on a normal graph. Along with adjustments in activation function and training loss, we expect this work to set a new strong baseline for future explorations of mesh-based fluid simulations with graph neural networks.

Percolation threshold is an important measure to determine the inherent rigidity of large networks. Predictors of the percolation threshold for large networks are computationally intense to run, hence it is a necessity to develop predictors of the percolation threshold of networks, that do not rely on numerical simulations. We demonstrate the efficacy of five machine learning-based regression techniques for the accurate prediction of the percolation threshold. The dataset generated to train the machine learning models contains a total of 777 real and synthetic networks and consists of 5 statistical and structural properties of networks as features and the numerically computed percolation threshold as the output attribute. We establish that the machine learning models outperform three existing empirical estimators of bond percolation threshold, and extend this experiment to predict site and explosive percolation. We also compare the performance of our models in predicting the percolation threshold and find that the gradient boosting regressor, multilayer perceptron and random forests regression models achieve the least RMSE values among the models utilized.

There has been much interest recently in developing fair clustering algorithms that seek to do justice to the representation of groups defined along sensitive attributes such as race and gender. We observe that clustering algorithms could generate clusters such that different groups are disadvantaged within different clusters. We develop a clustering algorithm, building upon the centroid clustering paradigm pioneered by classical algorithms such as $k$-means, where we focus on mitigating the unfairness experienced by the most-disadvantaged group within each cluster. Our method uses an iterative optimisation paradigm whereby an initial cluster assignment is modified by reassigning objects to clusters such that the worst-off sensitive group within each cluster is benefitted. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive empirical evaluations over a novel evaluation metric on real-world datasets. Specifically, we show that our method is effective in enhancing cluster-level group representativity fairness significantly at low impact on cluster coherence.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Solving real-world optimal control problems are challenging tasks, as the system dynamics can be highly non-linear or including nonconvex objectives and constraints, while in some cases the dynamics are unknown, making it hard to numerically solve the optimal control actions. To deal with such modeling and computation challenges, in this paper, we integrate Neural Networks with the Pontryagin's Minimum Principle (PMP), and propose a computationally efficient framework NN-PMP. The resulting controller can be implemented for systems with unknown and complex dynamics. It can not only utilize the accurate surrogate models parameterized by neural networks, but also efficiently recover the optimality conditions along with the optimal action sequences via PMP conditions. A toy example on a nonlinear Martian Base operation along with a real-world lossy energy storage arbitrage example demonstrates our proposed NN-PMP is a general and versatile computation tool for finding optimal solutions. Compared with solutions provided by the numerical optimization solver with approximated linear dynamics, NN-PMP achieves more efficient system modeling and higher performance in terms of control objectives.

The celebrated FedAvg algorithm of McMahan et al. (2017) is based on three components: client sampling (CS), data sampling (DS) and local training (LT). While the first two are reasonably well understood, the third component, whose role is to reduce the number of communication rounds needed to train the model, resisted all attempts at a satisfactory theoretical explanation. Malinovsky et al. (2022) identified four distinct generations of LT methods based on the quality of the provided theoretical communication complexity guarantees. Despite a lot of progress in this area, none of the existing works were able to show that it is theoretically better to employ multiple local gradient-type steps (i.e., to engage in LT) than to rely on a single local gradient-type step only in the important heterogeneous data regime. In a recent breakthrough embodied in their ProxSkip method and its theoretical analysis, Mishchenko et al. (2022) showed that LT indeed leads to provable communication acceleration for arbitrarily heterogeneous data, thus jump-starting the $5^{\rm th}$ generation of LT methods. However, while these latest generation LT methods are compatible with DS, none of them support CS. We resolve this open problem in the affirmative. In order to do so, we had to base our algorithmic development on new algorithmic and theoretical foundations.

Neural operators, which emerge as implicit solution operators of hidden governing equations, have recently become popular tools for learning responses of complex real-world physical systems. Nevertheless, the majority of neural operator applications has thus far been data-driven, which neglects the intrinsic preservation of fundamental physical laws in data. In this paper, we introduce a novel integral neural operator architecture, to learn physical models with fundamental conservation laws automatically guaranteed. In particular, by replacing the frame-dependent position information with its invariant counterpart in the kernel space, the proposed neural operator is by design translation- and rotation-invariant, and consequently abides by the conservation laws of linear and angular momentums. As applications, we demonstrate the expressivity and efficacy of our model in learning complex material behaviors from both synthetic and experimental datasets, and show that, by automatically satisfying these essential physical laws, our learned neural operator is not only generalizable in handling translated and rotated datasets, but also achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency as compared to baseline neural operator models.

The task of video prediction and generation is known to be notoriously difficult, with the research in this area largely limited to short-term predictions. Though plagued with noise and stochasticity, videos consist of features that are organised in a spatiotemporal hierarchy, different features possessing different temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Latent Hierarchy (DLH) -- a deep hierarchical latent model that represents videos as a hierarchy of latent states that evolve over separate and fluid timescales. Each latent state is a mixture distribution with two components, representing the immediate past and the predicted future, causing the model to learn transitions only between sufficiently dissimilar states, while clustering temporally persistent states closer together. Using this unique property, DLH naturally discovers the spatiotemporal structure of a dataset and learns disentangled representations across its hierarchy. We hypothesise that this simplifies the task of modeling temporal dynamics of a video, improves the learning of long-term dependencies, and reduces error accumulation. As evidence, we demonstrate that DLH outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in video prediction, is able to better represent stochasticity, as well as to dynamically adjust its hierarchical and temporal structure. Our paper shows, among other things, how progress in representation learning can translate into progress in prediction tasks.

This paper introduces a learned hierarchical B-frame coding scheme in response to the Grand Challenge on Neural Network-based Video Coding at ISCAS 2023. We address specifically three issues, including (1) B-frame coding, (2) YUV 4:2:0 coding, and (3) content-adaptive variable-rate coding with only one single model. Most learned video codecs operate internally in the RGB domain for P-frame coding. B-frame coding for YUV 4:2:0 content is largely under-explored. In addition, while there have been prior works on variable-rate coding with conditional convolution, most of them fail to consider the content information. We build our scheme on conditional augmented normalized flows (CANF). It features conditional motion and inter-frame codecs for efficient B-frame coding. To cope with YUV 4:2:0 content, two conditional inter-frame codecs are used to process the Y and UV components separately, with the coding of the UV components conditioned additionally on the Y component. Moreover, we introduce adaptive feature modulation in every convolutional layer, taking into account both the content information and the coding levels of B-frames to achieve content-adaptive variable-rate coding. Experimental results show that our model outperforms x265 and the winner of last year's challenge on commonly used datasets in terms of PSNR-YUV.

This short study reformulates the statistical Bayesian learning problem using a quantum mechanics framework. Density operators representing ensembles of pure states of sample wave functions are used in place probability densities. We show that such representation allows to formulate the statistical Bayesian learning problem in different coordinate systems on the sample space. We further show that such representation allows to learn projections of density operators using a kernel trick. In particular, the study highlights that decomposing wave functions rather than probability densities, as it is done in kernel embedding, allows to preserve the nature of probability operators. Results are illustrated with a simple example using discrete orthogonal wavelet transform of density operators.

This work proposes a view of probability as a relative measure rather than an absolute one. To demonstrate this concept, we focus on finite outcome spaces and develop three fundamental axioms that establish requirements for relative probability functions. We then provide a library of examples of these functions and a system for composing them. Additionally, we discuss a relative version of Bayesian inference and its digital implementation. Finally, we prove the topological closure of the relative probability space, highlighting its ability to preserve information under limits.

We study the problem of graph clustering under a broad class of objectives in which the quality of a cluster is defined based on the ratio between the number of edges in the cluster, and the total weight of vertices in the cluster. We show that our definition is closely related to popular clustering measures, namely normalized associations, which is a dual of the normalized cut objective, and normalized modularity. We give a linear time constant-approximate algorithm for our objective, which implies the first constant-factor approximation algorithms for normalized modularity and normalized associations.

Model bias triggered by long-tailed data has been widely studied. However, measure based on the number of samples cannot explicate three phenomena simultaneously: (1) Given enough data, the classification performance gain is marginal with additional samples. (2) Classification performance decays precipitously as the number of training samples decreases when there is insufficient data. (3) Model trained on sample-balanced datasets still has different biases for different classes. In this work, we define and quantify the semantic scale of classes, which is used to measure the feature diversity of classes. It is exciting to find experimentally that there is a marginal effect of semantic scale, which perfectly describes the first two phenomena. Further, the quantitative measurement of semantic scale imbalance is proposed, which can accurately reflect model bias on multiple datasets, even on sample-balanced data, revealing a novel perspective for the study of class imbalance. Due to the prevalence of semantic scale imbalance, we propose semantic-scale-balanced learning, including a general loss improvement scheme and a dynamic re-weighting training framework that overcomes the challenge of calculating semantic scales in real-time during iterations. Comprehensive experiments show that dynamic semantic-scale-balanced learning consistently enables the model to perform superiorly on large-scale long-tailed and non-long-tailed natural and medical datasets, which is a good starting point for mitigating the prevalent but unnoticed model bias.

Mean-field games have been used as a theoretical tool to obtain an approximate Nash equilibrium for symmetric and anonymous $N$-player games in literature. However, limiting applicability, existing theoretical results assume variations of a "population generative model", which allows arbitrary modifications of the population distribution by the learning algorithm. Instead, we show that $N$ agents running policy mirror ascent converge to the Nash equilibrium of the regularized game within $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ samples from a single sample trajectory without a population generative model, up to a standard $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}})$ error due to the mean field. Taking a divergent approach from literature, instead of working with the best-response map we first show that a policy mirror ascent map can be used to construct a contractive operator having the Nash equilibrium as its fixed point. Next, we prove that conditional TD-learning in $N$-agent games can learn value functions within $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ time steps. These results allow proving sample complexity guarantees in the oracle-free setting by only relying on a sample path from the $N$ agent simulator. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methodology allows for independent learning by $N$ agents with finite sample guarantees.

We study the problem of planning under model uncertainty in an online meta-reinforcement learning (RL) setting where an agent is presented with a sequence of related tasks with limited interactions per task. The agent can use its experience in each task and across tasks to estimate both the transition model and the distribution over tasks. We propose an algorithm to meta-learn the underlying structure across tasks, utilize it to plan in each task, and upper-bound the regret of the planning loss. Our bound suggests that the average regret over tasks decreases as the number of tasks increases and as the tasks are more similar. In the classical single-task setting, it is known that the planning horizon should depend on the estimated model's accuracy, that is, on the number of samples within task. We generalize this finding to meta-RL and study this dependence of planning horizons on the number of tasks. Based on our theoretical findings, we derive heuristics for selecting slowly increasing discount factors, and we validate its significance empirically.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.

Meta Learning automates the search for learning algorithms. At the same time, it creates a dependency on human engineering on the meta-level, where meta learning algorithms need to be designed. In this paper, we investigate self-referential meta learning systems that modify themselves without the need for explicit meta optimization. We discuss the relationship of such systems to in-context and memory-based meta learning and show that self-referential neural networks require functionality to be reused in the form of parameter sharing. Finally, we propose fitness monotonic execution (FME), a simple approach to avoid explicit meta optimization. A neural network self-modifies to solve bandit and classic control tasks, improves its self-modifications, and learns how to learn, purely by assigning more computational resources to better performing solutions.

Kernels are efficient in representing nonlocal dependence and they are widely used to design operators between function spaces. Thus, learning kernels in operators from data is an inverse problem of general interest. Due to the nonlocal dependence, the inverse problem can be severely ill-posed with a data-dependent singular inversion operator. The Bayesian approach overcomes the ill-posedness through a non-degenerate prior. However, a fixed non-degenerate prior leads to a divergent posterior mean when the observation noise becomes small, if the data induces a perturbation in the eigenspace of zero eigenvalues of the inversion operator. We introduce a data-adaptive prior to achieve a stable posterior whose mean always has a small noise limit. The data-adaptive prior's covariance is the inversion operator with a hyper-parameter selected adaptive to data by the L-curve method. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis on the computational practice of the data-adaptive prior, and demonstrate it on Toeplitz matrices and integral operators. Numerical tests show that a fixed prior can lead to a divergent posterior mean in the presence of any of the four types of errors: discretization error, model error, partial observation and wrong noise assumption. In contrast, the data-adaptive prior always attains posterior means with small noise limits.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Designing an intelligent volume-weighted average price (VWAP) strategy is a critical concern for brokers, since traditional rule-based strategies are relatively static that cannot achieve a lower transaction cost in a dynamic market. Many studies have tried to minimize the cost via reinforcement learning, but there are bottlenecks in improvement, especially for long-duration strategies such as the VWAP strategy. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning and hierarchical reinforcement learning jointed architecture termed Macro-Meta-Micro Trader (M3T) to capture market patterns and execute orders from different temporal scales. The Macro Trader first allocates a parent order into tranches based on volume profiles as the traditional VWAP strategy does, but a long short-term memory neural network is used to improve the forecasting accuracy. Then the Meta Trader selects a short-term subgoal appropriate to instant liquidity within each tranche to form a mini-tranche. The Micro Trader consequently extracts the instant market state and fulfils the subgoal with the lowest transaction cost. Our experiments over stocks listed on the Shanghai stock exchange demonstrate that our approach outperforms baselines in terms of VWAP slippage, with an average cost saving of 1.16 base points compared to the optimal baseline.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

Automatic Image Cropping is a challenging task with many practical downstream applications. The task is often divided into sub-problems - generating cropping candidates, finding the visually important regions, and determining aesthetics to select the most appealing candidate. Prior approaches model one or more of these sub-problems separately, and often combine them sequentially. We propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to crop images directly, without explicitly modeling image aesthetics, evaluating multiple crop candidates, or detecting visually salient regions. Our model is trained on a large dataset of images cropped by experienced editors and can simultaneously predict bounding boxes for multiple fixed aspect ratios. We consider the aspect ratio of the cropped image to be a critical factor that influences aesthetics. Prior approaches for automatic image cropping, did not enforce the aspect ratio of the outputs, likely due to a lack of datasets for this task. We, therefore, benchmark our method on public datasets for two related tasks - first, aesthetic image cropping without regard to aspect ratio, and second, thumbnail generation that requires fixed aspect ratio outputs, but where aesthetics are not crucial. We show that our strategy is competitive with or performs better than existing methods in both these tasks. Furthermore, our one-stage model is easier to train and significantly faster than existing two-stage or end-to-end methods for inference. We present a qualitative evaluation study, and find that our model is able to generalize to diverse images from unseen datasets and often retains compositional properties of the original images after cropping. Our results demonstrate that explicitly modeling image aesthetics or visual attention regions is not necessarily required to build a competitive image cropping algorithm.

Graph clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised learning, with numerous applications in computer science and in analysing real-world data. In many real-world applications, we find that the clusters have a significant high-level structure. This is often overlooked in the design and analysis of graph clustering algorithms which make strong simplifying assumptions about the structure of the graph. This thesis addresses the natural question of whether the structure of clusters can be learned efficiently and describes four new algorithmic results for learning such structure in graphs and hypergraphs. All of the presented theoretical results are extensively evaluated on both synthetic and real-word datasets of different domains, including image classification and segmentation, migration networks, co-authorship networks, and natural language processing. These experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed algorithms are practical, effective, and immediately applicable for learning the structure of clusters in real-world data.

While the rollout of the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is underway across the globe with the intention to deliver 4K/8K UHD videos, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) content to the mass amounts of users, the coverage and throughput are still one of the most significant issues, especially in the rural areas, where only 5G in the low-frequency band are being deployed. This called for a high-performance adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm that can maximize the user quality of experience given 5G network characteristics and data rate of UHD contents. Recently, many of the newly proposed ABR techniques were machine-learning based. Among that, Pensieve is one of the state-of-the-art techniques, which utilized reinforcement-learning to generate an ABR algorithm based on observation of past decision performance. By incorporating the context of the 5G network and UHD content, Pensieve has been optimized into Pensieve 5G. New QoE metrics that more accurately represent the QoE of UHD video streaming on the different types of devices were proposed and used to evaluate Pensieve 5G against other ABR techniques including the original Pensieve. The results from the simulation based on the real 5G Standalone (SA) network throughput shows that Pensieve 5G outperforms both conventional algorithms and Pensieve with the average QoE improvement of 8.8% and 14.2%, respectively. Additionally, Pensieve 5G also performed well on the commercial 5G NR-NR Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) Network, despite the training being done solely using the data from the 5G Standalone (SA) network.

We study the problem of estimating latent population flows from aggregated count data. This problem arises when individual trajectories are not available due to privacy issues or measurement fidelity. Instead, the aggregated observations are measured over discrete-time points, for estimating the population flows among states. Most related studies tackle the problems by learning the transition parameters of a time-homogeneous Markov process. Nonetheless, most real-world population flows can be influenced by various uncertainties such as traffic jam and weather conditions. Thus, in many cases, a time-homogeneous Markov model is a poor approximation of the much more complex population flows. To circumvent this difficulty, we resort to a multi-marginal optimal transport (MOT) formulation that can naturally represent aggregated observations with constrained marginals, and encode time-dependent transition matrices by the cost functions. In particular, we propose to estimate the transition flows from aggregated data by learning the cost functions of the MOT framework, which enables us to capture time-varying dynamic patterns. The experiments demonstrate the improved accuracy of the proposed algorithms than the related methods in estimating several real-world transition flows.

Inferring knowledge from clinical trials using knowledge graph embedding is an emerging area. However, customizing graph embeddings for different use cases remains a significant challenge. We propose custom2vec, an algorithmic framework to customize graph embeddings by incorporating user preferences in training the embeddings. It captures user preferences by adding custom nodes and links derived from manually vetted results of a separate information retrieval method. We propose a joint learning objective to preserve the original network structure while incorporating the user's custom annotations. We hypothesize that the custom training improves user-expected predictions, for example, in link prediction tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of custom2vec for clinical trials related to non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with two customization scenarios: recommending immuno-oncology trials evaluating PD-1 inhibitors and exploring similar trials that compare new therapies with a standard of care. The results show that custom2vec training achieves better performance than the conventional training methods. Our approach is a novel way to customize knowledge graph embeddings and enable more accurate recommendations and predictions.

Time-series anomaly detection is an important task and has been widely applied in the industry. Since manual data annotation is expensive and inefficient, most applications adopt unsupervised anomaly detection methods, but the results are usually sub-optimal and unsatisfactory to end customers. Weak supervision is a promising paradigm for obtaining considerable labels in a low-cost way, which enables the customers to label data by writing heuristic rules rather than annotating each instance individually. However, in the time-series domain, it is hard for people to write reasonable labeling functions as the time-series data is numerically continuous and difficult to be understood. In this paper, we propose a Label-Efficient Interactive Time-Series Anomaly Detection (LEIAD) system, which enables a user to improve the results of unsupervised anomaly detection by performing only a small amount of interactions with the system. To achieve this goal, the system integrates weak supervision and active learning collaboratively while generating labeling functions automatically using only a few labeled data. All of these techniques are complementary and can promote each other in a reinforced manner. We conduct experiments on three time-series anomaly detection datasets, demonstrating that the proposed system is superior to existing solutions in both weak supervision and active learning areas. Also, the system has been tested in a real scenario in industry to show its practicality.

There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by proposing hypotheses to be verified or falsified through potentially complex and time-consuming experiments, including thought experiments akin to those of mathematicians. While an artificial scientist expands its knowledge, it remains biased towards the simplest, least costly experiments that still have surprising outcomes, until they become boring. We present an empirical analysis of the automatic generation of interesting experiments. In the first setting, we investigate self-invented experiments in a reinforcement-providing environment and show that they lead to effective exploration. In the second setting, pure thought experiments are implemented as the weights of recurrent neural networks generated by a neural experiment generator. Initially interesting thought experiments may become boring over time.

The ability to jointly learn from multiple modalities, such as text, audio, and visual data, is a defining feature of intelligent systems. While there have been promising advances in designing neural networks to harness multimodal data, the enormous success of data augmentation currently remains limited to single-modality tasks like image classification. Indeed, it is particularly difficult to augment each modality while preserving the overall semantic structure of the data; for example, a caption may no longer be a good description of an image after standard augmentations have been applied, such as translation. Moreover, it is challenging to specify reasonable transformations that are not tailored to a particular modality. In this paper, we introduce LeMDA, Learning Multimodal Data Augmentation, an easy-to-use method that automatically learns to jointly augment multimodal data in feature space, with no constraints on the identities of the modalities or the relationship between modalities. We show that LeMDA can (1) profoundly improve the performance of multimodal deep learning architectures, (2) apply to combinations of modalities that have not been previously considered, and (3) achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications comprised of image, text, and tabular data.

Implicit regularization is an important way to interpret neural networks. Recent theory starts to explain implicit regularization with the model of deep matrix factorization (DMF) and analyze the trajectory of discrete gradient dynamics in the optimization process. These discrete gradient dynamics are relatively small but not infinitesimal, thus fitting well with the practical implementation of neural networks. Currently, discrete gradient dynamics analysis has been successfully applied to shallow networks but encounters the difficulty of complex computation for deep networks. In this work, we introduce another discrete gradient dynamics approach to explain implicit regularization, i.e. landscape analysis. It mainly focuses on gradient regions, such as saddle points and local minima. We theoretically establish the connection between saddle point escaping (SPE) stages and the matrix rank in DMF. We prove that, for a rank-R matrix reconstruction, DMF will converge to a second-order critical point after R stages of SPE. This conclusion is further experimentally verified on a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem. This work provides a new theory to analyze implicit regularization in deep learning.

In the era of noisy intermediate scale quantum devices, variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are currently one of the main strategies for building quantum machine learning models. These models are made up of a quantum part and a classical part. The quantum part is given by a parametrization $U$, which, in general, is obtained from the product of different quantum gates. By its turn, the classical part corresponds to an optimizer that updates the parameters of $U$ in order to minimize a cost function $C$. However, despite the many applications of VQCs, there are still questions to be answered, such as for example: What is the best sequence of gates to be used? How to optimize their parameters? Which cost function to use? How the architecture of the quantum chips influences the final results? In this article, we focus on answering the last question. We will show that, in general, the cost function will tend to a typical average value the closer the parameterization used is from a $2$-design. Therefore, the closer this parameterization is to a $2$-design, the less the result of the quantum neural network model will depend on its parametrization. As a consequence, we can use the own architecture of the quantum chips to defined the VQC parametrization, avoiding the use of additional swap gates and thus diminishing the VQC depth and the associated errors.